Web 2 Voice

Over on the IfByPhone blog, I posted a note on a mashup one of our guys did with Yelp.  With about 30 minutes of effort, and 20 lines of code, we opened up the entirety of the Yelp review database to anyone with a phone.

What the mashup does is ask you for the phone number of the business you’re looking for information on, and you get the total number of reviews for that business and the average review.  We’re working on phase 2 as we speak.

This is a little mashup that took almost no time, and yet has a good amount of utility (and we have ideas on on more features that will add more value to this service).  I published the mashup mainly to prove a point.  This simple and inexpensive mashup really provides great value to Yelp.  We’re opening up their database so that now it can be used be people with no access to a computer.

The value of a service like Yelp is not so much in the data.  It’s in the use of the data.  It’s great that they have a huge number of reviews on their site.  But it’s not until someone actually sees that data that it becomes useful.  By adding voice access to your database\applicaiton\network you can dramatically increase the usage of that data, and by definition the value of the service you are providing.

I encourage you to check out my post on IfByPhone’s blog.  But if you want to try out the mashup, just call 866.596.8333 and type in the number of the business you want reviewed (use 312.266.1616 for the place with the best ribs in Chicago).

I’m going to be sitting in a booth at Web 2.0 Expo, NY Wednesday and Thursday for IfByPhone.  If you are going to be around, stop by.  IfByPhone is announcing yet another application to go along with our ever expanding suite, so look for a press release soon.

I probably won’t be attending many of the talks, but the one I am hoping to see is Fred Wilson’s Keynote.  Today, Fred announced in his blog that his VC firm has invested in Zemanta.  You can check out related links provided by Zemanta below.  I think it’s a nice fit with their portfolio, and I like the service they provide.  Zemanta scans a post as you type, and suggests related articles and pictures to include in your post.  Pretty cool.

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There are days when I feel like a Fred Wilson portfolio fan boy.  I am seriously high on Twitter (their vision of what’s to come, I think is impressive).  But I also love Disqus, the comment system I use on all my blogs.

Both of these technology companies do something that is both an obvious need and difficult to accomplish.  Simply put, that’s making the conversation more interesting.  One of Fred’s common themes in his blog is that the comments are much more interesting than the actual posts.  I don’t know that he gives himself enough credit, but the underlying point is accurate.  There is real value in the conversations that are going on on blogs, on tweets, and other places.

I really value technology that brings those conversations to new audiences, and allows for more conversations. Disqus just released a new version (which will be appearing here shortly).  Go check out Fred’s post, and the official Diqus post.
You can follow me on Twitter here.  My Disqus profile is here.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve worked for a few different startups (organically funded, VC backed, Angel backed, etc).  I am nothing if not a sucker for information, so I tend to be hyper aware of perceptions of both the company I work for as well as the industry we are in.

One thing that it took me a while to realize is that people likely aren’t going to be a fan of what you’re doing.  More to the point, if what you’re doing is really popular, you probably aren’t doing it right.  Think about it.

What do all startups have in common?  First, the vast majority fail.  So if you’re a pundit, you’re going to be right most of the time betting against.  Secondly, a startup is about doing things differently than what other companies that are already successful are doing.  It’s not hyperbole to say that startups are mini-revolutions.

If it’s not revolutionary, there is probably someone out there who has more money that can do what you’re doing reasonably well.  It’s the vision of the founders and leaders of a company that set it apart.  It’s having a vision that is unique.

Honestly, it took me awhile to realize this.  But now that I had that little epiphany, I think it’s pretty obvious in retrospect.  And it makes me worry a lot less about public perception as well.

My favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson has a post today “The Lazy and Smarter Web.”

He talks about how great social media is because you can ask almost any question, and get great answers.  I commented that it’s great for Fred, because he has thousands of followers in his social net.  For regular people, not so much.  And thanks to Disqus, you can see the back and forth it generated here.

Anyway, his reply is that sooner or later, people will start following places (and presumably things and concepts).  So the limitaiton in followers (at least for Twitter) will go away.  This particular solution is limited to Twitter (I’d love to see something like dynamic rooms in FriendFeed).  But it’s a step in the right direction.

That’s yet another reason why Twitter is a big part of the future.  It’s really the best way to track the Internet Zeitgeist.  It’s a fast moving, reactionary, real time conversation.  We’re not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.

Another reason Twitter is great is that someone now added voice to it.  Go check out Phweet.  It’s very cool - developed by Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer .

I had a meeting with a smart prospect yesterday.  We had a short talk about  how our companies might work together, got to know each other, complain about the weather.  At the end of the conversation, he said “so, you blog a lot huh.  I google everyone I talk to.”

It was the first time anyone had admitted to Googling me before we talked.  It was validating in a way.  A big reason I blog is to raise not only the profile of my employer, but my own personal profile as well.  And when I did an ego search, it was pretty interesting.

I have two main blogs that I write on in a professional sense, this one and IfByPhone’s.  When I googled my name, the first two pages were filled with a guest post I did at VoipSupply.  That’s great, but it would have been much better if I had been paying attention to what people were going to see when they searched for me.  You see, my prospect thought I was a VOIP guy, which I am not. The reason it shows up all over is because I blogged there under my full name, not just my first name.

So a short lesson is that if you’re going to build a personal brand, you might want to make sure to:

• Ego search every once in a while
• Market your full name

epiphany (as defined by Dicitonary.com): a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

I was writing this post on IfByPhone’s blog today (JumpForward and IfByPhone in partnership), and immediately after that I found Garrett Smtih’s (Who is Voice 2.0 enabling?) and iLocus (Emerging merging with the ordinary). The three posts all deal with Voice 2.0 and the services that companies are providing.

A sample from Garrett:

“For a few years now, we have all been touting the promise of Voice 2.0, the death of the PSTN and the revolution that is upon us, yet to date, this new wave has not come crashing down on the traditional voice world with the might that one might think. It isn’t for a lack of trying, but mainly from a lack of a focused vision.”

and from iLocus:

“But the value of your network is proportional to the number of people that are inside that network, not outside that network. Look at the most successful IM clients.”

I think it’s a little sad that the Voice 2.0 sector hasn’t had more success in monetizing their services.  But Garrett is right.  The focus isn’t there.  Providing low cost phone calls is the WalMart approach to this problem.  We need to add real value - true innovation.  Right now, companies are fighting a battle between creating this market and monetizing it.   That’s why you see the WalMart approach.  Revenue needs to be there.

But what we really need to be focused on is adding voice to the places where it needs to be and really isn’t.  Where does voice have an advantage that Email, IM, wall postings don’t?  There are some conversations that need to happen by voice.  Voice 2.0 companies can bring that to a wide audience.

So the question is: Where is that audience?  It’s in social media.  The audience is on Facebook, on Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, even Plaxo.  Allowing people to have conversations that interest both parties is monetizable.  Be it a company wanting to know if you’ll be there to accept a package and using Twitter to ask for a real time response (assuming the fail whale goes away permanently), or be it a college coach wanting to connect to potential recruits that meet specific criteria via JumpForward.  Those are conversations that people will pay to have.

The real challenge is in finding people that want to talk to each other, and providing them the ability to do that.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a decent amount of my social networking time over at Plurk (here is my page).  My first reaction is that it is much better than Twitter for conversations (with much less down time).

They solved many of the problems that Twitter has - threaded replies being the biggest.   You post a plurk and see as direct replies what people have to say.  It ’s a real conversation instead of the hunting and pecking that is involved with Twitter.  If you go back to a plurk from yesterday, you see the entrie conversation.  With Twitter, you have a serious problem with that.

Then I noticed Karma.  The general idea is that the more you contribute to conversations in a positive way, the more karma you get.  The more karma you get, the more options (avatar, keywords, emoticons) you have available.  And on the face of it, it seems like a good idea.    In theory if you spam the community you’d be penalized.

But what it ends up doing is creating conversation for conversation’s sake.  If you want karma, you have to plurk all the time.  You go to sleep you lose karma.  Which irritates people.  And really, what is karma but a way just to keep people on the site?

Really what they should be focusing on is the utility.  The ability to bring the conversations to other devices, sites, applications, etc.

Twitter has that.  In a post on TechCruch today, Arrington notes that Twitter is branding itself as a communicaiton utility.  The real power of Twitter is that you can use it for so many different purposes and from so many different devices.  The threading will work eventually.  They’ll figure it out.

And soon enough, you’ll see Twitter being used as an integration platform by players trying to tie together different forms of communication.  Meanwhile, Plurk will be a glorified chat room.

One of the reasons I’m interested in Social Media is because it’s using the Internet to bring people together. Humans are social animals, and the Social Media is constantly finding new ways to allow people to find each other and have interesting conversations.

I really like Twitter. Not just because it’s a great way to find new people, but because it also is extremely extensible. Sure, you can use it just like it’s intended. Since it has the ability to be a public broadcast system, you can use it to keep groups of people in touch with each other. Fred Wilson had been posting lyrics to Twitter every day. So he asked for someone to create a Twitterbot that would rebroadcast lyrics to everyone who followed the Twitter account LOTD.

Whitney stepped up and did exactly that. And thankfully he posted all the code he used. It’s actually pretty simple, even for someone who doesn’t know programming. So, partially because I’m more of a movie guy than a music guy, and partially because I just wanted to, I copied the code and created the Movie Line of the Day Twitter bot.

So it works exactly like the LOTD Twitter bot. Subscribe to MLOTD on Twitter to receive the notifications. Then post a movie line starting with @mlotd. If you have room at the end, say which movie the line is from.
Hopefully other people will find this interesting as well. But expanding on my original point I don’t really see Twitter so much as a product that can be sold It’s just a specific, easily accessible communications channel. It’s use is only limited by your creativity.
My next step is integrating my company’s technology with Twitter. I’ve already successfully posted to Twitter after receiving a voicemail, but I still need to tweak it a little bit. Should be done soon.

I read this post at How to Split an Atom, on the recent problems with Twitter and participated in a nice discussion.

Twitter is a nice little service. I hesitate calling it a product, even though it has some high profile investors. A product, by my own definition is something you can sell. A service is something you can use. I use Twitter, but I can’t figure out how they’d make me want to pay for it (or as an alternative, monetize my use).

I really like aspects of Twitter. I see conversations that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and I meet new people (in the online sense at least). It’s a great tool to keep in touch, and learn what’s going on today, and what’s important to people you have things in common with.

Beyond the obvious “how is it going to make money?”, the question I have with Twitter is: What makes it sticky? What prevents people replacing it with something else? Nothing that I see. Would there be pain if I left Twitter, and wanted to ‘take my audience with me?’ Probably. But is that pain enough to stop me from paying more attention to FriendFeed each time I get an API Error in my Twitter client? No. I’m sure you can use the API to help port users to another service if you wanted.

Twitter is in a similar position to Tivo. I love Tivo. My experience with DirecTv has been significantly worse since they replaced my Tivo box with their in-house branded DVR. But, am I going to cancel DirecTv and go with the more expensive cable just to stick with Tivo? No.

Twitter has to be more sticky if it wants to survive. I think it needs to understand that it is a transport mechanism first and foremost. The 140 character limit, the lack of threading, the concept of followers, all those are interesting but completely replicatable.

But if you look at it as a communications gateway to and from my phone\blog\sms\rss\blog comments\friendfeed discussions\etc, then it becomes indispensable. As Fred Wilson quotes a friend in this post: “It’s not so much the data that’s so valuable, it’s the flow of information through it.”

When Twitter becomes the defacto transport of data through the various social media outlets THAT is when it gets sticky.