Web 2 Voice

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

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.