• Seth’s Blog: Don’t Shave That Yak! – A thing that I do, which I shouldn't.
• SnapABug visual customer support – Another live support feature for your website, but this one includes screen capture to help troubleshooting.
• 13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs | Resources –
• Buzzzy – A Search Engine for Buzz. – Google Buzz search with an API.
• New Facebook Statistics Show Big Increase in Content Sharing, Local Business Pages – Facebook historical statistics as of February 2010 based on previous updates to their public statistics page.
• Lost Moon Radio: Live Band Karaoke With The Moon Units – Live band karaoke in LA. Available for parties and private events. Very fun!
• Fixed to Flexible – The Ebook – A free 37 page eBook on high-level microeconomic business theory with solid practical examples. The primary focus is on margin, specifically the pricing and cost strategies that go into that equation. It's a very quick read, concisely and clearly written with very illustrative (if somewhat over-simplified) examples.

  For me, the most interesting ideas were on 'constructing value' for a previously unknown product. First, you need to have a compelling free offering so there is minimal risk to customers trying your new product. Secondly, you should take the lead in setting the perceived value of your new product by using an 'anchor' of premium pricing even if you end up selling at a discount to it.

• The Twitter Engineering Blog: Introducing the Open Source Twitter Text libraries – Twitter releases libraries for parsing tweets.
• Great Lake, a Chicago Pizza Shop, Enjoys Being Small – Question – NYTimes.com – A very interesting story about a small artisan pizza shop in Chicago that was reviewed in GQ as one of the best pizza shops in America and how they are (or rather aren't) dealing with their newfound success.

  "We really enjoy the work that we’re doing and we don’t want to cheapen it. Consciously or unconsciously — probably both — we’re trying to create a manageable way to earn a living and still maintain our sanity. We value time as much, if not more so, than money."

• Give-A-Fuck-O-Meter – Saving this to send to people in the future when they tell me something I could care less about.
• The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage – Conservative attorney Ted Olson, a member of the legal team challenging the federal constitutionality of California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, explains his rationale for participating in the case as a conservative American who wishes to preserve and forward the fundamental principles on which this country was founded:
  "Conservatives and liberals alike need to come together on principles that surely unite us. Certainly, we can agree on the value of strong families, lasting domestic relationships, and communities populated by persons with recognized and sanctioned bonds to one another. Confining some of our neighbors and friends who share these same values to an outlaw or second-class status undermines their sense of belonging and weakens their ties with the rest of us and what should be our common aspirations."
• YouTube – Sugar: The Bitter Truth – A very interesting, if long and sometimes quite technical (it is a med school lecture) explanation of the scientific, socio-economic, and political reasons our food is making us less healthy as a nation (and ultimately a planet) in the last 30 years. It centers around increasing our refined sugar intake, in particular fructose, which has the same long-term chronic health effects as alcohol.
• The Third & The Seventh on Vimeo – One of the most amazingly photo-real works of CG animation I've ever seen.
• Facebook Developers | Extending Facebook Share – Mention of awe.sm in the official Facebook blog post announcing their new sharecount button and data APIs.
• How Best Buy plans to beat Wal-Mart – Dec. 1, 2009 – A strategy to make Clayton Christensen proud. Best Buy is betting that the consumer electronics and computer markets have not yet reached a good enough point where cost is the only factor. By providing an integrated buying/service solution with their in-house Geek Squad division, Best Buy hopes to differentiate from retailers like Wal-Mart who are commoditizing the purchase experience. In this case Best Buy is playing the Apple Computer role to Wal-Mart's WinTel approach.
• What’s strategic for Google? – An interesting and concise analysis of Google's various product/business initiatives using a simple but intuitive strategic framework.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Entrepreneuring…Side Effects | Howard Lindzon – A humorous (but all too true) list of the potential side-effects of starting your own business.
• Paul Buchheit: Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life – A very interesting rationale for the potential common good of social media behavior that is increasingly referred to as "over-sharing". The more we share about what we think and do, the more information will be available to help improve ours and others' future decisions.

  "The basic pattern of openness is that better access to information and better systems lead to better decisions and better living. This general principal is broadly accepted, but we're just now discovering that it also applies to the minutiae of our lives."

• The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap « Deep Dive Marketing – A very thorough account of the many ways Imogen Heap is using different social media services (i.e. Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, uStream) as a cohesive whole to build deeper relationships with her most engaged fans.
• Ping – How Sharing Links Has Become Big Business – NYTimes.com – NY Times article on the democratization of influence on the web and the roll of individuals and their social networks as traffic drivers.
• 20×200 : Print Information : think-make-think (second edition) – If I were ever to hang an inspirational print on my wall, this would be it.
• Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics: Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, November 16 – 19, 2009, New York, NY – Web 2.0 Expo panel on which I will be speaking on 11/16/2009
• Op-Ed Contributor – Wall Street Smarts – NYTimes.com – A deceptively simple (yet likely true) explanation of the underlying cause of the financial meltdown: the level of Wall Street’s intelligence finally caught up with that of its greed.
• Twitter to Facebook: 5 Ways to Post to Both – Mashable mention of TweetPo.st.
• Letters of Note: Okay, you lazy bitch – A great letter from Hunter S. Thompson to a production executive on film adaptation of his book “The Rum Diary.” If you know anything about the film business, you know that sometimes cursing and threats of bodily harm are more than appropriate, they’re necessary
• No. 1 With Bullets? USB Uzi Is Latest Killer Album Format | Underwire | Wired.com – Wired blog coverage of the upcoming release from Get Busy Committee, which will be available on Uzi-shaped USB drives.
• 100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words – Ars Technica – A well-compiled overview of the arguments used by content industries to stifle various production and distribution innovations from the gramophone to the DVR. The overriding theme being that incumbent content producers are more inclined to seek government intervention (usually through sensationalist fear-mongering tactics) to protect old models in the face of new technologies rather than to figure out ways to improve their businesses to take full advantage of the benefits these technologies afford.
• Olark – sell better using live chat – Live chat tool to interact with customers on your website in real-time.
• 30 Under 30 2009 – Hype Machine Profile – Very nice write-up of my friend Anthony Volodkin, founder of the Hype Machine, named #27 in Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 for 2009. He definitely should have been higher
• The power of no reward | Derek Sivers – An interesting article on the difference between ‘Social Mindset’ and ‘Market Mindset’. Actions driven out of personal volition are more authentic and the motivation is more powerful though more difficult to activate. Whereas actions driven out of financial calculation are by definition more mercenary — easier to activate, but of less value and harder to maintain. If you can appeal to someone’s ‘Social Mindset’, you cheapen your offer by invoking their ‘Market Mindset’.
• The Power Of Passed Links – A framework for thinking about the relative value of inbound traffic from different sources based on conversions (however one defines them) and growth. The hypothesis is that links passed from friend to friend via channels like Facebook and Twitter will have significantly higher conversions.
• Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes: Get Wasted With The Day, In Robes recorded Aug 31, 2009 – Live session with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, including downloadable tracks.
• Official Google Blog: Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer – “Each and every time someone types in a search query, AdWords runs a new keyword auction. Advertisers who are still bidding on a cost-per-click basis will be using the same bid in many different auctions, so sometimes their bid may be too high or too low. However, for advertisers using Conversion Optimizer, we’ll automatically adjust the bid for each of these auctions so that it can hit the sweet spot more often, helping the advertiser to make more money.”
• Seed is the new Series A for VCs | VentureBeat – A good overview on the move by later stage investors into earlier “seed” rounds along with advice for entrepreneurs on raising a pre-Series A round.
• Know all those Retweet Buttons across the web? Well now Facebook has one. – The first write-up on fbShare.me, from The Next Web.
• Awe.sm Lets You Track Articles Shared Into Facebook – Write-up of the latest Snowball Factory product, the fbShare.me sharecount button for Facebook.

• Analytics Talk » Blog Archive » Tracking YouTube Videos with Google Analytics – How to build a chromeless YouTube player with Google Analytics event tracker code. Useful if you want embedded YouTube videos but care enough about Google Analytics data to build your own custom player.
• startuptools / FrontPage – A wiki-fied list of useful business tools for startups across various categories from development frameworks to CRM.
• More Ways To Shorten Those URLs: UnHub And Lnk.by – The first public mention of awe.sm in the blogosphere
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? – A comprehensive analysis of the 15 most used URL shorteners out there today based on criteria such as redirection type, tracking, client support, and domain length. Also includes some interesting survey responses on which shorteners people use and why.
• 140 Characters » How Twitter Was Born – A first-hand account of how Twitter was born out of foundering startup Odeo. From the humblest of beginnings to Oprah and Ashton Kutcher!

In the meantime, here’s some footage I shot of their show at The Echo on Monday night (YouTube HD doesn’t quite do the 1080p footage from Kelly’s Canon 5D Mark II, aka my dream camera, justice):

And here are the photos:

Kelly (and her camera) had to leave a couple of songs into the Edward Sharpe set (I had told her they went on at 10pm and they didn’t end up starting until 12:30am). So, what you see here is just them getting started — to give you a sense of where it ended up, Alex, the lead singer (formerly of IMA Robot), spent a good deal of the show shirtless in the audience. I’m actually kinda glad I didn’t have the option of documenting the rest of their set, because I got to go crazy with the rest of the crowd instead. But I’d gladly give up a night of rocking out in order to have the opportunity to properly document this incredible spectacle. Dave, call me!

P.S. I first discovered Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros through the most excellent NPR All Songs Considered Live Concerts podcast (originally via Ian, of course).

Update: Here’s some video of the opener, Fool’s Gold:

I have 1 more Edward Sharpe video, but it’s just barely over YouTube’s 1GB upload cap. So, I guess I’m gonna keep it to myself for now.

• Social Media ROI – Solid presentation on how to approach social media marketing from a quantitative perspective. Most interesting are the examples of different types of social media campaigns to drive different business goals. There is no one-size-fits all social media marketing campaign.
• The Lab – A web-based Sass -> CSS compiler. Sass is basically a shorthand way to write stylesheets for your website. It allows for nesting with two spaces. Also, it can do some basic math with constants. No more going around your CSS files updating the size or color of something.
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – "When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse…With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."
• Changing Nature of Virality: Facebook and Twitter – A consolidation of interesting stats from Hitwise on percentages of traffic to entertainment sites driven by Twitter and Facebook. For example, perezhilton.com's biggest week ever was driven primarily by traffic from Facebook (8.70%) over Google (7.62%). It is clear that for certain types of sites, particularly entertainment-oriented, 'viral' discovery is an increasingly important discovery mechanism being fueled by the growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
• The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver – Fred Wilson on the impact he's seeing to traffic on his own blog from Twitter and Facebook: "Links are the currency of the web and traffic is money so these are important trends for our portfolio companies and for everyone who does business on the web."
• Tony Hsieh: Zappos In The Business of Selling “Happiness” – This was a really great presentation that i was lucky enough to attend in person. Some of my favorite quotes were "Hire slowly, fire quicky", "When all your employees live the brand, you don't need to rely on marketing and PR to handle all your communications", and "We decided to take all the money we would have put into marketing and put it into making the customer experience better." While I do feel that Zappos sounds more like a management/corporate culture experiment than a business, I still think there are a ton of great lessons that less altruistic businesses can apply. My primary takeaway was probably on Slide 17 of the presentation, the idea of "Committable Core Values": having a company mission that is actionable for every employee.
• Economy Tech trends in 2009 by Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) – An omnibus presentation on the current economic climate and the high-level trends that will drive the technology industry in the near future. The first ~40 slides contain some really interesting data and charts on the larger macroeconomic situation and are worth looking at even for people not interested in the technology industry.
• The Memefication of Your Band – A more pragmatic take on the entertainment-as-a-service concept focused on how musical artists can more effectively promote themselves. "Your band must invade the Perception Economy. Your Band must no longer be a band. Your band must be a meme. A Meme Which Generates subMemes. These memes must be compelling, intriguing, and interesting enough for people to ‘follow’ or at least think that you are ‘worth following.’"
• High-tech Market Research and Consulting – Quantitative application of the Lanchester model, a WWII military strategy framework, to business in which market share is the proxy for number of troops. Interesting theoretical construct for understanding how players with differing market share should seek to compete in order to maximize their competitive advantage — i.e. smaller players should seek to segment a larger market into smaller pieces in which they can compete closer to market share parity while larger players should seek to compete in the broadest market possible to maximize the value of their dominance.
• WordPress › WP Greet Box « WordPress Plugins – A very useful WordPress plugin that shows visitors to your blog a unique greeting message depending on the page they are visiting from. E.g. Ask users coming from Digg.com to Digg your post, etc.
• Chat Catcher – An interesting service to help you track mentions of your blog posts across Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca and aggregate them back to your blog. The coolest thing is probably the 'Scriptless' version which can run on WordPress.com and other hosted blogs.
• Viral Arts: Making you money… Virally – A potentially interesting service that matches YouTube video producers with brands willing to pay them for product placement.
• The changing face of usability testing: Optimal Workshop releases free service called Treejack » VentureBeat – Basic DIY usability testing tools that allow you to test designs in the form of online surveys. Simple, elegant, and IMHO 80/20 effective (vs full-service usability testing software).
• Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg – Definitely what I would be working on if I was in charge of bit.ly. While analytics were the initial draw for sharers to use bit.ly, recognition as an influencer could be a differentiator now that others like cli.gs and tr.im are commoditizing analytics for shortened URLs. I totally agree with Om that a bit.ly powered Digg (Bigg?) would produce much more interesting and representative results than Digg, which has come to be dominated by an idiosyncratic user community. Also, I think it would be foolish of Bigg to be reserved to bit.ly URLs. Why wouldn't they want share/click data from all the shortened URLs they can get it for?
• Topspin » “Josh Freese. What are you doin’? This summer.” – Brilliant (and hilarious) showcase of how the internet can make even the way you sell your art part of the experience. Definitely worth the read! My favorite is the $10k package, which includes: "Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror) / At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please."
• Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric – Bokardo – A very interesting analysis of the difference between the asymmetric relationship model of Twitter (arguably pioneered by Flickr) and the mostly symmetric relationship model of Facebook today and why the reality of attention inequality is a barrier to Facebook's growth as long as they stick to symmetric relationships.

• THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube – Unbelievable remixes of music samples from various YouTube videos into really great songs and fascinating videos. This is the poster-project for Remix culture! (hope someone sends it to Lessig)
• Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams – A great collection of rules on how to design products. While originally meant for physical products (industrial design), I think many of the rules still apply to online products and web design. Some of my favorites:
  – Good design makes a product useful
  – Good design helps a product to be understood
  – Good design is unobtrusive
  – *Good design is thorough to the last detail*
  – Good design is as little as possible

  And some quotes:
  "The aesthetic quality of a product – and the fascination it inspires – is an integral part of the its utility."
  "Things which are different in order to simply be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different."
  (And on a personal note, my late grandma had Rams's Cylindric T2 lighter in her apartment when I was a kid and I always got in trouble for playing with it, but its design fascinated me.)

• Bookmarklet Builder – Handy tool for building bookmarklets, can convert back and forth from normal Javascript to bookmarklet form.
• TwitterFriends – Your relevant network on Twitter – The most comprehensive (and interesting) Twitter stats application I've found to date. Instead of gimmickry about how you rank against other Twitter users in meaninglessly vague and opaque terms like "authority," this exposes the hard data about yours and your network's behavior compared to average, and gives you some pretty cool visualizations. If I understood statistics and such better, I think this is the kinda tool I could totally geek out on.
• Which HD video Web service is the best? | Webware – CNET – In depth side-by-side comparison of online video hosting services.
  "- The victor: YouTube
  This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can't beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it's up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies."
• The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com – A (very tasty) example of the power of social media to spread content virally. According to the article, the blog post about this recipe garnered 27,000 views 2 days after being posted thanks mostly to Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. In the month since being posted, it has been viewed 390,000 times and linked to from 16,000 sites. Not bad for some bacon.
• Secrets of my success: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings – Jan. 28, 2009 – A brief profile on Reed Hastings w/ business tips:
  – Target a specific niche: When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "nice to have" market.
  – Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet.
  – Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn't going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn't by 2003.
  – There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it's through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.
• Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Netflix results show that streaming video views are taking away from DVD-by-mail volume. Given that there is no price difference (both streaming and DVD-by-mail cost the same per month), the streaming bitrate is at DVD quality or less, and the selection of films available for streaming is worse than that of DVD-by-mail, this is further proof that *convenience* (the only real advantage of streaming vs. DVD-by-mail) is a very powerful motivator for media consumers.
• Facebook Pages Leaderboard – A neat tool for tracking the popularity of Facebook Pages by number of fans over time. However, the data doesn't appear to be totally reliable. So, be sure to check the current stats on Facebook before hanging your hat on any of these numbers.
• Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker – Interesting facts about Facebook Page fan stats (as of January 27, 2009)
  – Barack Obama is #1 w/ 4.7M fans, Homer Simpson is #2 w/ 2.6M, and Coca-Cola is #3 w/ 2.3M (I pulled the stats for these from Facebook directly)
  – All Facebook is tracking 620,000 Pages
  – Only 50,000 Pages (~8%) have > 1,000 fans
  – Only 276 Pages (~0.04%) have > 500,000 fans
• Deborah Schultz: Life isn’t binary, neither is the Social Web – "The social web is my web – it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium…The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel – it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting…and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play."

• Tube Mogul Buys Video Analytics Firm – "TubeMogul currently has over 40,000 users, ranging from networks and studios such as CBS, to web only video producers and bloggers like 'Fred.' Illumenex current clients include Internet TV pioneer Revision3 and comedy site 'eBaum’s World.'”
• "Don’t forget…" – a set on Flickr – Really cool street art project in Berlin (where else) that is adding Photoshop interface elements to billboards to remind passers-by that these images of beauty are artificially enhanced. (via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9591)
• Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News – Facebook is now allowing custom FBML tags, essentially code libraries produced by 3rd party application developers that can be used by other application developers to add functionality from one app to another. This opens the door to officially sanctioned mash-ups of Facebook apps, which are already mash-ups in themselves. Using the term mash-up in a non-ironic fashion makes me want to punch myself.
• The Inauguration of President Barack Obama – The Big Picture – Boston.com – A poignant collection of photos of Barack Obama's inauguration and the reactions to it around the world. My favorite is the American soldier in Iraq crying tears of joy (#19). The fact that the routine transfer of power in our country can inspire such powerful reactions around the world is evidence of what a truly global world in which we now we live. And I believe it shows that we as American citizens are making progress towards redeeming ourselves in the eyes of the world, who hold *us* (not just our leaders) accountable for the actions of our nation.
• Transcript – Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address – Text – NYTimes.com – Text of Obama's inaugural address.
• Rev. Lowery Inauguration benediction. Transcript. – Lynn Sweet – "Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right."
• Resources Every WordPress Theme Developer Should Know About! | Arbenting – A comprehensive list of resources for WordPress Theme development.
• YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money – NYTimes.com – Many have long claimed that the only profitable type of online video content was repurposed TV shows/films or other "professionally produced" content. This article give several examples dispelling that myth and showing that the online video audience and business has reached a point where even so-called amateurs can make real money. For example, Michael Buckley is making >$100k/year from his homegrown entertainment news show "What the Buck?" purely through YouTube's partner program.
• Op-Ed Contributors – The End of the Financial World as We Know It – NYTimes.com – Comprehensive (if not revelatory) overview of some of the primary drivers of the financial bubble and resulting collapse by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. Puts things like the failures of the ratings agencies and the greed of financial services company shareholders, which have been examined more deeply on their own, into the broader context of our current hindsight.
• YouTube Is Changing How We Think About Video | Techdirt – "The power of YouTube is that it enables something entirely new and different to emerge and to thrive. In the history of disruptive innovations, merely taking a product from one medium and moving it to another usually doesn't get very far. It's the projects that really embrace the new possibilities that are only possible via that new medium that really make an impact."

Last week, our friend (and first client) Joel Moss Levinson, aka Happyjoel, appeared in a CBS Evening News with Katie Couric segment called Cashing In on YouTube (watch it below). For Joel, this follows an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a profile in the New York Times, and (our personal favorite) being named an AccessHollywood.com Rising Star. As you can see in the clip below, the majority of this coverage has been driven by the novelty of Joel’s success. He’s a guy who subsists entirely by making amusing music videos for products for which he has no personal affinity — what news producer wouldn’t love this story?!

Watch CBS Videos Online

For us though, the real story isn’t the wackiness of Joel’s success but rather how he has achieved it. Of course, having the ability to come up with witty lyrics about how awesome watermelons are and the time and energy to scour the interwebs for brands looking to crowd-source their marketing are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. Michael Buckley, the other online video personality covered in the CBS News segment, told the NY Times “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime.” Like Michael, Joel does a lot more than just what you see on screen. Arguably, making the videos is the easy part (at least for someone like Joel) — the real challenge has been building and cultivating the loyal fan-base (or as Joel calls it, his “contest voting army”) that has made him such a newsworthy phenomenon.

As of this writing, Joel has:

• 257 fans on Facebook
• 1,128 members of his “Yes, Joel, I’ll vote for your newest stupid contest” Facebook Group
• 339 subscribers on YouTube
• 138 followers on Twitter
• 153 members of his Google Group/mailing list
• 344 friends on MySpace
• 35 contacts on Flickr
• and thousands of views per month on his blog

Each of these relationship channels has different strengths and weaknesses, and we have achieved a good measure of success using them in concert through best practices and a substantial time commitment. But, the system is far from perfect. In addition to the redundant work required to build and maintain relationships through all these various channels, it is very difficult to identify and de-duplicate the individuals across them, and it is basically impossible to have a cohesive view of what is going on in your fan universe.

While 800 lbs brands like Britney Spears or 50 Cent have enough clout to ask their fans to sign up for new services, the rest of us need to find effective ways to reach our potential fans where they already live online. YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and other popular social media services provide access to their huge existing audiences, but the relationships you build through them have to be on their terms. We’ve learned from experience in the trenches with clients like Joel and Handsome Donkey, and we’re hard at work on a solution that gives independent online media brands the best of both worlds: access to existing social media audiences with greater control over the fan relationships it generates. So, stay tuned!

As predicted, MySpace users are getting pissed off that the social network they originally chose for its openness is now denying them access to the best of breed services they desire.

There will never again be *one* destination that provides *everything* a user wants and needs. The only way to be ubiquitous is to be completely open and allow users to use your product (whether it be a homepage on which they can embed any service they choose, or a service they can embed in any homepage they choose) how they see fit. Openness is now a viable basis of competition, and you will be undercut by a more open competitor if you are too closed. 

MySpace thinks that they built YouTube, and maybe they did. But, where would MySpace be without all those users embedding and watching YouTube videos on MySpace long before there was a MySpace video player? A smaller piece of the pie can be worth more, if the pie itself is made bigger by allowing distributed innovation to create value for your consumers in ways that you can’t or wouldn’t.