ACTION

I follow about 1600 people on Twitter and recieve something between 5 to 10 tweets every minute. The people that I follow are often social and broadcasting very much of their life. The timeline is always like a long queue with hundreds of unread tweets and people always ask me why I don’t unfollow more people. My simple answer is that everyone I follow is followed manually and I really like to follow people. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the tools is not quite there yet to filter out the most important tweets for me.

When I reached 400 people that I’m following on Twitter it became hard to follow conversations. Everything over 400 makes it hard to follow. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with your personal timeline and you hardly can’t track back in time if you’re slept.. If it’s hard to keep up with the stream, then it’s also hard to make a conversation with your followers.

Tools like Tweetie and Tweetdeck can make it easier to keep up your following speed but it’s impossible to read every single tweet. In Tweetie I can go back about 30 minutes when I reload my timeline and it’s impossible to track the nights when I’m sleeping.

I hope Twitter will listen to users that follows more than 400 people and do something about this design problem even if I don’t belive that they’re taking this problem too serious right now. I believe that the focus is to get users to use Twitter.com as the main Twitter client instead of third party clients.

The most critical part of  Twitter is that it’s hard (even with third party clients) to follow and participate in conversations. In Tweetie I can thread conversations and therefor it’s easier to interact with other users and not only to broadcast messages. The thing with Twitter is that I want it to be a conversational platform and it’s still got the potential but with the current interface on Twitter.com and third party clients like Tweetie or Tweetdeck it’s to hard to interact with other users.

The broadcasting model is dying and therefor we need better tools to make a conversation. I really believes that microblogs will be the new form of conversation but Twitter needs to get native support of threaded messages or it will be a broadcasting model like the newspaper industry already is. It’s like a crowdsourced newspaper with a lot of short storiess. But the thing is that social media should not act like like it is traditional media. We want it to be interactive and we want to have our conversations with followers. At least I do.

Twitter got the most interesting user base right now but it’s not the best tool to have a conversation with. Let us follow more conversations than people becuase the people is often less interesting than the discussion between them.

1. Do something unique and do it quick
A large corporation is ofter slower than you think in their developing process because of the internal bureaucracy. They got more restrictions and it’s often a lot of politics to even start a project in a large corporation. If you reach the goal to do something unique they will try to follow but if you do it before them you’re in the lead and that’s where you need to be. You don’t have to do something completely different but it has to have something that’s unique.

2. Do never compete with price
The larger corporations can often compete with price but it’s better to compete with quality, functions or customer service. The only thing you never should compete with is price, becuase why would you? I would like to pay more for your product or service if you gave more. One example is that I rather eat on a local hamburger restaurant than McDonalds because they often give me better service and more delicious burgers.

3. Become number one in your niche
If you’re faster than the larger corporation to develop your product you have to become better than they are. If you’re becoming number one with your product or service the larger corporations will have to make it better. You have to stay focus on your product because being number two is never an option.

4. Use your position as an underdog
If you use your position as an underdog you are going reach out to more customers. People love the story about David vs. Goliath and if you’re in the position to use it, just do it. Market yourself as the underdog and do it all the way. If you treat your customers well they will treat you well. Customer service is the most important part in your organisation.

Photocredit to Kirk Siang

The idea is not the final product. It’s just an idea and if you can’t make money from the idea it’s not worth pitching. if you only got an idea then you’re not the entrepreneur but can you make the idea into a real product or service it will be your baby and it’s then firt you can be titled Entrepreneur. If you can sell the product or service (I mean units, don’t think of an exit yet) then you even can call yourself a Businessman. Let your business focus on the customer and not just around the idea. Customer-driven products or services are always better than a idea-driven product or service. It’s time for you to take your idea and make it real.

It’s better to be a first class entreprenuer with a lousy idea than to be a lousy entrepreneur with a first class idea. Build it and then show it, not the other way around. Action!

It’s an ongoing hype right now for startups to make location based applications and services. We see apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude taking over our Twitter and Facebook stream and everyone hopes that we like to know where they are just at the moment. We don’t. But that’s another story.

Brightkite and Latitude has another approach and they just displaying where we are and sometimes notify us if someone we know is nearby in the same area. With Brightkite we can “Check in” and post photos and texts. Latitude is just a complement for the rest of Google’s web based applications, you’re supposed to be online all the time on the service but iPhones can’t do it because it can’t multitask. It’s much better on Android phones though.

Foursquare and Gowalla on the other hand is more like games. When I watched the founder Dennis Crowley from Foursquare making a presentation and I noticed that he focused on the gaming part of the app. Why should you walk the same way every day, if you’re walking another way the next day it will give you points. Why will you stay at one bar all night and why not go to a lot of bars instead? It’s easier to be spontanious if you have something to look forward to. He also said that they are hacking the city, and if you try out the service you will see it. It’s really possible to hack the city. Gowalla is about the same but it’s much cuter and you get rewarded with digital goods.

I’m focused on Foursquare and Gowalla because these two apps are perfect for marketing. Now I’m just waiting for Starbucks to make their own competition to visit 15 different Starbucks and get a cup of coffee for free or Pizza Hut to do the same thing. I wonder how many companies that wants to become featured spots to check in at, I would love to buy one on Gowalla. If I was the company then I would have done exactly that to market my position. You can also set up location based competitions for your costumers to do to get something and I assure you that they will do.

One more thing they can do to make money on the location based service is to sell them as tourist guides. If you don’t know what to do in a city then it’s perfect to check out near spots to visit.

Today Google announced Google Chrome OS. But what is there to get me to use Google Chrome OS instead of Mac OS X that I use today? If I can speed up my work by just stay connected in the cloud, I’ll gladly do that. Web applications is what I use exclusively now except Spotify, which always rolls in the background with music. It’s faster to boot up than a conventional OS, Google is highlighting security and it is open source under the BSD license thet will make it easier will be able to modify the operating system.

Apple tried to do the same thing when they released the first generation iPhone. Only to focus on web applications apparently did not succeed then but perhaps it does today. Palm Pre failed recently, and both iPhone OS and Android running native apps today. Maybe the computers are ready now and the performance will be enough for Chrome OS to succeed. I hope so.

Since I don’t need to modify the operating system and just want it to work smoothly it will probably not be the right platform for me. Much of the things Google mentioned in the live broadcast was that it was a specific machine, and I think it may be their take on Apple’s upcoming tablet, or any netbook.

Of course, I will try out their “device” when it is released by the end of next year!

Many entrepreneurs are talking about making an exit as soon as possible. Selling of their company as soon as possible to either become a serial entrepreneur, or to sit back and be able to relax in an indeterminate future. Why is the focus on selling the company instead of building the company?

37signals mentions the phenomenon in their latest podcast which is about something they’ve written about before, over-valued companies that have barely reached the stage to call for companies. Has the business world moved away from taking care of their business and operate it to see it as a one-night stand that they dragged home from the pub on a Friday night?

In a conference that I was attending last week, a famous venture capitalist who has been around for a while talked about this. Everyone constantly talks about exits, but before you are getting a divorce you have to be married.

Photocredit to Dean Terry