Monthly Archives: January 2008

Updated: Why Use Twitter When You Can Make Your Own Microblogging Network With Wordpress Prologue?

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Quick Summary: The Wordpress Prologue theme from Automattic may be the first step towards an open-source distributed micro-blogging platform.

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Wordpress creator Automattic has launched a new theme called Prologue which can be used to create private Twitter-like micro-blogging platforms.

Basically, the Prologue theme uses the Wordpress content management system to mimic the Twitter interface. Here are three reasons why I like Prologue –

(+) The “whatcha up to?” post form integrated into the front page is nifty for posting short tweet-sized messages. It would be useful, however, to have a “title” field apart from “post” and “tags”.

(+) The theme is built to be used by multiple authors (see demo blog) and author-wise RSS feeds are useful for linking each author’s posts to their Twitter accounts, via TwitterFeed.

(+) The summary view on the front page, expandable by clicking on authors or tags, is a neat touch. The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user.

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Potential Game Changer for Word-of-Mouth/ Social/ Viral Marketing: Duncan Watts Debunks Influentials & Tipping Point

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Quick Summary: Duncan Watts debunks The Influentials and The Tipping Point, but word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing practitioners will do well to continue to focus on the tipping point potential of influentials.

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Here’s a potential game changer for word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing.

Word-of-mouth/ social/ viral marketing is based on the premise, best captured in bestsellers like The Influentials and The Tipping Point, that a small cadre of well-connected people can trigger, or tip, trends. Reach the influentials and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.

Now, based on his new research, network theory scientist Duncan Watts, who is working at Yahoo! on sabbatical from Columbia University, says that this simple premise is wrong. While I’m still trying to fully understand what Watts own premise is, here is my three sentence summary of what he seems to be saying –

- Even supper-connected influentials don’t have the power to start a trend, unless the social context is anyways susceptible to the trend.

- The key, therefore, lies not in identifying influentials who will tip a trend, but in identifying trends that are ready to be tipped.

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Big Insight for Startups: Monetize the Idea Cluster Influence Curve

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Quick Summary: Businesses based on the influence curve of an idea cluster are likely to be more robust and less risky than businesses based on the influence curve of one idea.

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Idea Cluster Influence Curve

Ideas have a bell-shaped influence curve. Over time, ideas gain influence, reach a peak influence at a point in time and decline in influence thereafter. If your business is based on an idea, like all businesses are, your business is limited by the idea’s influence curve. To build a successful business, you would like to identify an idea early, build competence/ credibility before others during the growth phase, make money at peak influence, and exit/ diversify during the decline phase.

Different ideas have different influence curves. You can think of an influence curve in terms of height (peak influence), gradient (rate of acceptance) and width (life of idea). To build a successful business, you would like to identify an idea that has a fast rate of acceptance, a high peak influence, and a long life.

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