2010 April » Borasky Research Journal

Chirp – A Developer’s Perspective – Part 2 – Updated 2010-09-28

Apr 202010

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Updated 2010-09-28

As you probably know, I posted a rant Sunday about AngelGate. You can read it here if you haven’t already. Since then, quite a bit has happened.

The TechCrunch Disrupt conference opened in San Francisco. If you’re curious, the hashtag is #tcdisrupt.
At a panel on Monday, some of the principals in #angelgate were on stage, and they dodged the issues.
Today, Tim Armstrong of Aol was on stage to announce that Aol was purchasing TechCrunch.
A panel of women on “Women in Tech” was “led” by Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda). I didn’t watch the live stream, just the tweet stream, but the comments were quite negative – terms like “catfight” were some of the milder comments.

So I’m reposting this, unedited after the next horizontal rule. I’m very concerned about the nature of the Silicon Valley tech startup scene, as exemplified by what I saw in April at Chirp and what’s been going on at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’m concerned that young men and women are being encouraged to drop out of school and compete in a bizarre “TV reality show” format for funding, and I’m concerned even more that “no one over 38 need apply.” We don’t treat people like that here in Portland, Oregon.

I know women entrepreneurs are out there – building businesses, solving problems and creating jobs and economic value. I think their achievements are being obscured by the propaganda coming out of Silicon Valley. And I’m very frightened by the fact that a segment of the business world is encouraging bright young technical people of either gender to drop out of school in what is most likely a futile attempt to create the next Microsoft or the next Facebook, rather than join an existing business, university or government agency, where, quite frankly, the bulk of innovation takes place.

An Elephant In The Room

When I started this series, I promised some bigger elephants in the room than “Developers vs. Twitter”. I haven’t spent any time trying to sort these pachyderms by size or by how much we talk about them or don’t talk about them.

Two lists:

@pistachio, @ChloeS, @KaraSwisher, @lizasperling, @AmberCadabra, @MargaretFrancis,
@CarriBugbee, @KellyRFeller, @mediaChick, @PDXSays, @carmenhill, @embarkcreative

They’re all successful professional women and all influential in the Twitter community. The first six are from places other than Portland, and the second six are from Portland. There are many more such women, both here and elsewhere. I’ve met all of them except @KaraSwisher. They’re intelligent, educated and successful. But they aren’t software developers!

Now, a brief excursion into one of my favorite topics, capacity planning and queuing theory. We know that most venues have roughly equal rest room facilities for men and women. And we know that at most events, the lines for the womens’ rooms far exceed those for the men’s rooms during the breaks. It’s all because of Little’s Law – the “average residence time” is longer for a woman than a man. There’s even been legislation to “even things up.”

At Chirp, there were so many more men than women that the queue lengths for the men’s rooms far exceeded those for the womens’ rooms. I didn’t even bother to try and do the calculations. Maybe when I run out of more lucrative math problems to solve, I’ll dig into the numbers, or put up a simulation using the Prism Model Checker.

So there you have it – the elephant in the room is the dearth of women in software developer roles. @clairecm covered this well in “Out of the Loop In Silicon Valley“. And @hmason, a woman who’s a computer science professor, responded with “Stop Talking, Start Coding“. But I want to talk about this from the perspective of a veteran white male software developer – a developer who was at Chirp.

I’ve been a software developer for many years, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it wasn’t always like this, and that some places in the USA are better than others. For example, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC, at least when I was living on the East Coast, seem to be significantly more diverse than Silicon Valley. I’m discouraged that the profession I’ve worked in for so many years has gone down the path described in the article by @clairecm.

I know some very bright young women who have aspirations of going into the sciences. They’re bright people that will succeed in anything they try. They get stellar grades, stellar SAT scores, have great human communications skills, and so forth. They’re all likely to show up on From The Top and get Overachiever Awards. But if they came to me and said, “I want to be a software developer like you,” I’d tell them to rethink.

Mathematics? Sure! Computer Science? Sure! Software Engineering? Right on! Electrical Engineering? Go for it! Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Medicine, Mechanical / Civil Engineering? You bet! Law, Business, Management, Accounting, Finance, Economics, Marketing, Sales? Awesome! Architecture, Art, Music, Video, Drama, Poetry, Fiction, Film, Creative? Absolutely! Young woman, the world is your oyster!

But don’t become a software developer, unless you’re prepared to enter a world where

Beer, pizza, sugar and caffeine are the prevalent diet and fiber and protein aren’t,
Sixteen hour workdays and sixty hour workweeks are common and expected at frequent points in the project cycle,
The tools provided are primitive – in some cases, you have to build them yourself,
If you can’t build it in a weekend, totally rebuild it from scratch every two weeks, and become profitable in a summer, you’re screwed, and
“Iterate violently” is the normal modus operandi.

In short, you will be entering a world where the hacker culture, lifestyle, behavior and attitudes are the norm.

You will be entering a world where gladiatorial combat in code has replaced the discipline of software engineering. I believe that the reason there are so few women in software development today is that it has become a terrible place to be. The canaries have escaped from their cages and flown out of the coal mine.

Chirp

I was one of the first developers to sign up for Chirp. I want to say right up front that the things I learned were well worth the trip. The engineers at Twitter are world class. Twitter is in many ways a ground-breaking service and a force for good. And Twitter itself looks like a great place to work, even in software development. And they’re hiring! @jointheflock. Twitter looks like an exception to the dark picture I’ve painted.

But there was a dark undercurrent at Chirp. Many participants attended the conference starting at 8 AM on Wednesday, April 14th and went all the way to the party at 9 PM on the 15th. They were greeted at the door with the customary T-shirts – and mimosas! Mimosas at 8 AM? Breakfast consisted of sugar-filled and fat-filled pastries. There wasn’t any fresh fruit that I saw, and no eggs or meat. Subsequent meals were for the most part also carbohydrates, and of course, coffee, cookies, and soda.

There was a full day of conference presentations. These were both valuable and necessary information for people, like me, who want to be a value-creating member of the Twitter ecosystem. Then, participants were bussed to Fort Mason for the 24-Hour Hack Day. There’s a strong clue right there – the name “24-Hour Hack Day.”

Dinner was mostly pasta and rice, and of course, the beverages were beer and sodas. There was an Ignite Chirp session, where there were some carefully chosen presentations, mostly good, entertaining and inspiring. The music was loud.

But the dark undercurrent was “The Contest” – what Twitter called The Hack Day Showcase. A web site was set up where the developers could submit projects that they had built, provided they had started within the past year and received less than a million dollars in funding. The prize was a chance to do a demo for a panel of three “venture capitalists”.

Then the all-night hack session began. Coffee was served starting at 9 PM. Developers were encouraged to use the latest Twitter API developer previews to make applications and submit them to the showcase. Many stayed overnight to hack on their projects. Some caught some sleep on a couch, a beanbag or maybe even a bench. Some probably were up all night, hoping for a “win” in the showcase. I left about 10 PM.

When I returned the next day, Thursday the 15th, there were quite a few sacked-out developers. There was breakfast – more sugary pastries and cakes, and coffee, though thankfully no alcohol. Most of Twitter’s 150 employees were there, including all the executives, and the engineers who have made Twitter the stunning technological and cultural phenomenon it is.

Sure, there were good parts – the presentations on the technologies by the world-class Twitter engineers who have adapted cutting-edge open source technologies, improved upon them, and built something awesome out of them. And the lunch from the food carts almost made up for the disastrous breakfasts and so-so dinners.

But the focus of the day was the contest for the attention of the “venture capitalists” looking to invest in projects. In fact, we were “encouraged” to “network” with the VCs. It was a contest – gladiatorial combat in code.

I came down to Chirp hoping to hack on my project. The nature of my project fundamentally changed, though, when I learned about Twitter’s priorities during the conference day. And the API changed as well – vastly for the better, in fact. So I chose not to hack on my project. I got a good night’s sleep, and spent the second day attending the presentations by the engineers about the technologies I use in my development.

At 3 PM on Thursday – 30 hours into the conference for those who started at 9 AM the day before – the entry window for the contest to be in the showcase closed. I don’t know how many of those put in the full 30 hours straight, but I’m guessing from the number of sacked-out developers I saw that it was a fair number.

In all, over 100 projects were submitted before the showcase entries closed. At 5 PM, the showcase began. Only seven of the hundred-plus applications were chosen, and given 140 seconds to demonstrate their applications. The feedback from the panel was mostly positive, but the fact was that 93% of the effort went publicly unrecognized. There was supposed to be a web site where the rest of the applications will be posted. It’s been five days and I’m still waiting!

They kicked us out of the venue at 6 PM – the end of 24-Hour Hack Day. There was an after party at 9 PM, but I didn’t see the point of more alcohol and more loud music. So I went back to my hotel room and hung out on Twitter.

I Throw A Rock At Someone Famous

There’s an old saying, “If you want to become famous, throw a rock at somebody famous.” Well, I don’t know that this is a very big rock – more like a handful of pebbles – but I do want to single out somebody famous. I’m talking about somebody who was on stage at the culmination of Chirp, the Hack Day Showcase. And I’m talking about someone I can’t give you a hovercard for, because he’s the only person on the entire Chirp program that doesn’t have a Twitter account. Paul Graham, I’m looking at you. And I’m looking at one of the venture firms at Chirp, Y Combinator.

Let’s start with this quotation: “We care more about how smart you are than how old you are.” And then: “So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38.”

“The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One reason I put it there is that I don’t think many people have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. I don’t know if I could do that now.”

And: “Startups are stressful, and this, unfortunately, is also taken to an extreme with Web-based applications. Many software companies, especially at the beginning, have periods where the developers slept under their desks and so on. The alarming thing about Web-based software is that there is nothing to prevent this becoming the default. The stories about sleeping under desks usually end: then at last we shipped it and we all went home and slept for a week. Web-based software never ships. You can work 16-hour days for as long as you want to. And because you can, and your competitors can, you tend to be forced to. You can, so you must. It’s Parkinson’s Law running in reverse.”

“If I were going to start a startup today, there are only three places I’d consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares (Kendall is too sterile); in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. These are the only places I know that have the right kind of vibe.”

And then: “Paul Graham and Y Combinator to Leave Cambridge, Stay in Silicon Valley Year Round“: “We had to choose, and Palo Alto seemed a better place to raise kids than Cambridge, so we chose that.”

Ah, but entrepreneurs and startups are “job-creation engines” fueling economic growth, aren’t they?

“The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do. To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind. They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space, and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse. But worst of all, they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone’s office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have a meeting about it. So the fewer people you can hire, the better.”

There’s a lot more. Graham writes in excruciating detail about his model of hacker and startup culture. I think it’s a terrible way to build software businesses, and a way that is likely to produce useless and irrelevant ones. It appears to be a way that sorts very strongly for males, white or Asian, and young – between the ages of 23 and 38. It filters out women, African-Americans and, I’m guessing, it filters out Hispanic-Americans.

And it filters out places – even Boston, apparently, but certainly it filters out Portland, Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC. Paul Graham’s message is loud and clear – move to Silicon Valley or you don’t get funded:

“Can we do it without moving to where you are?

“Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them move.

“You can leave one founder at home, but the rest, including the CEO, have to live in the Bay Area during the 3 month funding cycle.

“Do we have to start a company in the US for you to invest in us?

“Yes, but that’s usually not a problem. It’s easy for foreign nationals to start US companies (much easier than remaining here physically), and investors and acquirers prefer them.”

Conclusion

I’ve been a software developer a long time. I’ve had titles ranging from “Mathematician” to “Computer Scientist” to “Systems Engineer” to “Software Engineer.” I’ve worked in industry, government and education. I’ve worked with and for women, African- and Hispanic-Americans, Canadians, Indians, Pakistanis, Haitians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indonesians, Nigerians, Iranians, and Israelis. I’ve worked with developers as young as 19 and as old as 70. All of them were productive software developers. Diversity works. Or at least, it used to work … in some places.

I don’t buy Paul Graham’s excuses that the nature of web application development and entrepreneurial startups mandates the gladiatorial hacker development style over the disciplines of software engineering and project management. These are proven strategies for success – strategies our profession has painfully extracted from the ruins of some spectacular failures, as first documented in Fred Brooks’ Mythical Man Month 2nd Edition.

I don’t buy Graham’s claim that Silicon Valley is a better place to raise children than Massachusetts. I don’t buy his claim that “hiring people is the worst thing a company can do.” And I’m saddened and disgusted that the hacker culture appears to have driven out both software engineering discipline and women from an industry that desperately needs both.

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Getting Started With @anywhere

Project Kipling 18 Responses »

Apr 192010

One of the most exciting developments at last week’s Chirp Twitter Developers’ Conference was a new tool set called @anywhere. While it’s easy for a developer to use, I thought I’d write a brief rundown for non-developers. If you have a web site and want to interact with Twitter, @anywhere is a quick and easy way to do it.

What does @anywhere give you?

Auto-linkification of @usernames: Any time you include a Twitter user name, like “@znmeb”, @anywhere turns it into a clickable link that takes a visitor directly to the user’s tweet stream.

Hovercards: A hovercard is the extension of auto-linkification. When a visitor mouses over the user name, a business-card-like display pops up, displaying selected items from the Twitter user’s profile. Try it here on @znmeb. The default display includes the Twitter avatar, name, user name and location. If the visitor isn’t following the user, there’s a “Follow” button. A “more” link expands the hovercard to include the web page link, bio, latest tweet, and counts of the user’s tweets, friends and followers. I never get tired of saying this: Hovercards are your friend – make sure they reflect your personal or business brand and use them liberally.

Follow Buttons: In addition to the follow button on a hovercard, @anywhere allows you to place a follow button anywhere on your web site.

Tweet Box: A tweet box is simply a place where your visitors can post to Twitter, right from your web page. The comments boxes on this web site are now augmented by tweet boxes.

User Login and Signup: Using this tool, it is possible for you to use Twitter to allow visitors to sign in to your site.

So how do you get @anywhere on your site? First of all, if you have a WordPress blog, getting on the air with @anywhere is simple. Just install @swhitley’s TwitConnect plugin. That’s how I’ve implemented @anywhere on the Borasky Research Journal. It’s a typical WordPress plugin – simply install it, activate it and fill in the “Settings” form. There’s a complete set of instructions here.

Here’s another tutorial on getting @anywhere up and running on WordPress: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-twitter-anywhere-in-wordpress/

Here’s another one – also links to some more WordPress @anywhere plugins! http://kovshenin.com/archives/setup-twitter-anywhere-for-wordpress-in-seconds/

If you are running a Drupal site, there’s a plugin for @anywhere as well, written by @abraham. That can be found, with complete documentation, at http://anywhere.drup.al/

If you don’t have either WordPress or Drupal, you’ll most likely need to engage a web developer. But the skills required are simply HTML, CSS and Javascript – there’s no server-side work at all. The @anywhere servers are all at Twitter. Just have your developer visit http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin and follow the instructions.

That’s a brief rundown of @anywhere. I should add that the basic functionality available now is just that – the basics. Future releases will allow much more. In fact, nearly everything you can do with Twitter will eventually be available on your web site via @anywhere!

Update: there is now a separate Google Group just for @anywhere development! To subscribe by email, send an email to twitter-dev-anywhere+subscribe@googlegroups.com, or visit http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-dev-anywhere

The Top Ten People Who Should Be On Twitter But Aren’t

Project Kipling 5 Responses »

Apr 182010

2. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

1. Hu Jintao

Chirp – A Developer’s Perspective – Part 1

Project Kipling 12 Responses »

Apr 152010

This isn’t the last blog post I’m going to do about Chirp. There are a lot of elephants in the room. And I promised myself that I would immerse myself in the experience before blogging. The wifi issues kept me from tweeting for most of the conference, and I haven’t had time to review the live stream recordings, so you’ll see blog posts coming from me over the next few days.

First and foremost, as a technologist, I believe what Twitter has built and what they are growing is a stunning achievement! The metaphors of “water cooler” and “cocktail party” simply do not do justice to what Twitter is. There really is no metaphor I can think of to describe millions of people tweeting. You can, of course, draw parallels with social insect colonies, flocks of birds, large multi-cell organisms, and so on, but those are qualitatively different from a global network of hundreds of millions of what most of us believe are the most intelligent creatures on Earth.

In a previous post, I focused on the technologies under the hood, so I want to focus on the people who have built this phenomenon – people we developers work with on a daily basis. I was privileged to meet Mark McBride (@mccv), Raffi Krikorian (@raffi), John Kalucki (@jkalucki), Matt Sanford (@mzsanford), Kevin Weil (@kevinweil), Taylor Singletary (@episod), Marcel Molina (@noradio), Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) and Chloe Sladden (@ChloeS). There were many more that I wanted to meet – 150 Twitter employees can easily get swamped by something like 1000 developers.

Next, I want to talk about the announcements that were made at Chirp. I’m going to save the Promoted Tweets discussion for a later blog post, because I think it deserves special focus, and just talk about the developer-visible changes. The two most important in my opinion are @anywhere and user streams. User streams are a bit complex, so I’m going to defer them, but I think @anywhere is something every developer – indeed, anyone who wants to work with Twitter – needs to understand now.

@anywhere allows a developer to integrate Twitter into a web site with just a few lines of JavaScript. The Getting Started guide is here. Key functionality:

One key takeaway on @anywhere: make sure your Hovercard reflects your brand, personal or corporate.

Finally, I want to briefly mention one of the elephants in the room, the tension between the developer community and Twitter that sprung up in the wake of Fred Wilson’s blog post about “filling holes” and Twitter’s announcement of Twitter-branded iPhone and Blackberry client applications. I’ve held off blogging about it for a couple of reasons, and, as you’ll see in later blog posts, I think there are bigger elephants in the room.

I want to emphasize that if there is indeed any “tension” between Twitter vs. third-party developers, then I am solidly on Twitter’s side. I’m appalled at some of the messages I’ve seen posted on the Twitter API Google Group. And I’m sad when I read some of the blog posts about it. Worse yet, there are those who seem to want to play, “Let’s you and him fight.” I’m declining that invitation. Personal branding does mean, “Don’t be an asshole!”

The ‘глупо муравей’ story: Shostakovich, musique concrète, Wikipedia, bullshit and curation

Project Kipling 25 Responses »

Apr 042010

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As you probably know, I’m a huge fan of electronic music, musique concrète, and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. So I was quite surprised on March 27th to discover this on the Wikipedia page under “Recorded Legacy”:

“Shostakovich’s fascination with the work of electrical engineer Nikola Tesla and his own hobby of electrical experimentation was to result in perhaps his most experimental musical recording: ‘глупо муравей’, named after his father’s playful nickname for the Cossacks, surfaced in the early 1990s. The work is notably experimental; indeed, Shostakovich is said to have created the piece with his own amateur electromagnetic devices, using magnetic tape to create its unique sounds. Arthur Rubinstein is said to have been heard saying it was ‘the most profound piece of music man has of yet created.’ [Citation needed]“

I immediately did a search using all the major search engines, and discovered that the Wikipedia entry was essentially the only reference to this piece, other than a tweet on February 28th

@NateHamilton: Trying to track down Dmitri Shostakovich’s experimental electronic music homage to Tesla – глупо муравей. No luck so far.

and another tweet on March 18th

@NateHamilton: Still trying to find Shostakovich´s глупо муравей. If anyone finds it, holla at me.

I posted a tweet about it myself on March 27th:

@AlgoCompSynth: Did you ever find Shostakovich´s глупо муравей? I just learned of it today via Wikipedia!

and heard back from @NateHamilton on the 28th:

@NateHamilton: @AlgoCompSynth I haven’t, but I’ve been looking extensively – outside online sources as well. Please tell me if you find any more about it!

On April 2, I picked up the trail again. I re-subscribed to the Usenet news group alt.fan.shostakovich and the DSCH-L Shostakovich mailing list. And I posted a query here and here. I never did hear anything back from alt.fan.shostakovich, but I received a not-entirely-unexpected response on the DSCH-L list:

>> "the most profound piece of music man has of yet created."[citation needed]"
> Citation: Journal of Profound Wikipedia Pranks, April 1st 2010
>
> 'глупо муравей' translates something like, "the foolish ant", apparently referring
> to those who would believe such a tale.
>
> This April Fool's prank is on a par with the apocryphal story that due to shrapnel
> lodged in Shostakovich's brain, he was able to tilt his head to one side to hear
> original music "pouring out" from his mind's ear. Those who fell for this ridiculous
> story include Donal Henahan of the New York Times, and Oliver Sacks in "Musicophilia".
>
> Am I being to much of a curmudgeon in spoiling someone's happy mischief? 

> Louis

The rest, as they say, is history. The Wikipedia page has been updated several times, and it now appears that ‘глупо муравей’ was a figment of someone’s imagination, perhaps someone at the Keele University Department of Music and Music Technology. Two of my great musical loves, Shostakovich and musique concrète, apparently never met in the real world, and will have to be satisfied with a fanciful meeting along the lines of When Harry Met Iannis.

Lessons learned:

All pranks and hoaxes on the Internet do not happen on the first of April. Every second of every day, someone is posting bullshit for every imaginable reason one would post bullshit.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
The Internet makes it possible for almost anyone to say almost anything for almost no cost.

The Wikipedia curation / peer review process may have its flaws, but within a day or so of the original posting, @NateHamilton discovered the posting and sent out a tweet looking for the composition. I found the posting on March 27, inquired on DSCH-L on April 2, and by April 4, the Wikipedia page was corrected. The discussion may be read here.

The point is that the Wikipedia curation process worked, and worked fairly rapidly once I accessed the collective wisdom on DSCH-L. The key technology is the complete audit trail provided by the Wikipedia software. I suspect that for topics of wider interest than Shostakovich and musique concrète, the process works much faster. We are now seeing history and journalism merging on the Internet in real time, and Twitter and Wikipedia are at the forefront. It’s a great time to be alive, and we are all curators!

Twitter Search API Changes – More Exciting News From Twitter!

Clicky, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Optimization, Viralheat 11 Responses »

Apr 012010

I’ve just received the following announcement from Taylor Singletary at Twitter:

“As indicated a few weeks ago, we’re launching our new *beta* enhancements to search.twitter.com and the Search API today — it’s currently rolling out to our servers. Thank you all for your feedback.”

I usually comment on these things after I’ve had a look at some of the resulting data, but in this case, there are some interesting facets of the announcement that I’d like to reproduce here.

“To date, Twitter’s real-time search has proven to be incredibly valuable. People, businesses and organizations have come to depend on finding out what’s being discussed about a particular topic *right now*.

“We’ve been really impressed at the integrations many of you have developed using the Search API. Whether it’s offering search columns in a Twitter client, mapping #hashtags to search, or deep analysis of trends and brand monitoring, you’ve shown us what’s possible with Twitter search.

“With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author’s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted,
favorited, replied, and more. It’s an evolving algorithm that we’ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.

“With this initial release, if we detect that there are particularly interesting & relevant tweets for a given query, we’ll display at most 3 of these tweets at the top of the page. We’ll also display the number of times these tweets have been recently retweeted as well.”

That’s a pretty impressive capability if they’ve really done it. I’ve held off commenting on Twitter’s new “front page” for people who aren’t signed in, mostly because I’ve been waiting to see if it had any impact on the rate at which new users join Twitter, and that takes a few days to get a large enough sample to be meaningful. I don’t personally use the information that’s on the front page – I either use commercial tools like Clicky and ViralHeat or go directly to the data via the APIs.

But the new metadata that’s coming from Twitter Search is going to radically alter the way I use Twitter Search. So, as the saying goes, “Watch This Space!”

What Would You Pay A Month For A Twitter Account?

Project Kipling 21 Responses »

Apr 012010

Yes, I know it’s April Fools’ Day. So when I saw this, I assumed it was an April Fools’ joke. But then I got to thinking – the Twitter services you get when you sign up are free, and yet they clearly have value to both those who simply read Twitter as a kind of news service, and those who use it as a promotional tool, a research tool, a networking tool or just a place to hang out on line with friends.

So now I’m curious – what if Twitter decided to charge for the service on a monthly basis. How should they price it? To determine that, I’ve created a survey using the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter. This is a little trick I learned from OTBC in their courses for entrepreneurs.

So if you’re curious too, help me out. Take the survey, answer the questions, and I’ll publish the analysis. Let me clarify a few things:

The prices I’m looking for are values per month in US dollars. I’ve set the survey up so it only accepts values between $0.01 and $100.00. If you’d really pay more that $100 a month for Twitter, don’t bother with me – call your stockbroker!
I’m doing this strictly out of curiosity – nobody is paying me to do this.
I include everything you currently get with a Twitter account – the ability to post tweets, follow people, block people, send DMs, and the ability to access Twitter via the API. I do not include Twitter Search or the new front page you see when you aren’t logged in! And I’m looking for its value to you, however you use Twitter.

Click here to take survey

A Little Known Fact About Mozart

Project Kipling 2 Responses »

Apr 012010

The composer we know today as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wasn’t born with that name. He was actually born Bob Mozart. One day, when he was in junior high, he came home and told his parents he had had enough of school and was going to go run with the wolves. Well, as you can imagine, they were furious! His father screamed, “A wolf gang? For the love of God!”

And it stuck.