Twitter Follow Spam

It happened to me again today (several times in all just this week)

Twitter sent me an email about a Twitter user that has decided to follow my tweets. I take a look at the Twitter ID and don't recognize it. So, I follow the link in the email to check out the person's profile. The last few tweets from this user are shown and seem a bit ... er ... NSFW. The "Web" link under "About" goes to a porn site .... great, just what I didn't want on Twitter, SPAM!

Hopefully the guys at Twitter are already aware of this and are actively doing something to fix it. I'd hate for Twitter to go the way of ICQ

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Interesting EC2/S3 Tools

A couple of interesting tools I've run across for EC2 and S3

EC2 Firefox extension - allows you to manage your EC2 instances in Firefox including:

  • List available AMIs
  • List your running instances
  • Launch new instances of an AMI
  • Manage security groups and launch permissions associated with your instances

 

AWSZone.com - EC2/S3 (entire, or almost the entire AWS platform actually). Very cool way to query AWS APIs via a web UI

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GOOG and the Cloud

Two interesting articles about Google and their efforts to bring cloud computing to the fore

NYT - "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft"

BusinessWeek - "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds"

Throw Amazon's efforts (EC2, S3) into the mix and this space is going to get really interesting. From my perspective, I'd be really happy if the next company I start can use cloud resources instead of having to build out physical infrastructure.

 

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Groklaw Article in ITPro

Great interview with Pamela Jones of Groklaw over at ITPro.

She plays down her contributions to the SCO battle - IMO Groklaw was a major contributor to stopping the SCO FUD.

Great quote about media bias in the US that applies to a lot more than patent/copyright issues:

There is, in the US anyway, a trend to attack people, not ideas, to try to defeat an idea by smearing someone who holds an idea you don't like.

 

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Redfin: The Cost of a Startup

The CEO of Redfin, Glenn Kelman, has a fantastic guest post on Guy Kawasaki's blog.

 

Glenn provides an incredible amount of visibility into the costs of a startup, providing side-by-side projected expenses vs actual. In particular, I found his comments on the business side of things (lawyers, accountants) to be great advice. Many entrepreneurs (esp. ones that are R&D oriented) aren't aware of the requirements placed on the company when taking outside investment.

 

 

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Love is F8

I snapped the picture below tonight in Palo Alto on my camera phone.

The license plate on the Mercedes reads "[HEART] is F8"

The driver was a 50-ish woman while the backseat was occupied by a 20-something male with brown hair.

I didn't get a great look at the passenger, but I'm still wondering if Mark Zuckerberg was being driven somewhere by his mother...

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comScore Adjusts Metrics

NewTeeVee has a post detailing changes comScore is making to count not only page views, but video streams and embeds.

Liz Gannes includes a table showing that Revver is likely underrepresented in the Hitwise numbers LeeAnn Prescott posted a month ago.

As I posted at the time, services like Revver and Blip.tv that have an embedding strategy have to be evaluated against the other video services in a similar fashion. As embedding is added to the vast majority of video sites, page views alone won't show an accurate picture of utilization. As advertising moves into video, accurate metrics will become crucial.

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YouTube Has Twice the Traffic of All Other Services Combined?

Interesting analysis over at LeAnn's Prescott's Hitwise blog today - she claims

As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined.

(The "64 sites" are unspecified). She also includes the following chart showing the Top 10 video sites in terms of traffic.

Jeremiah Owyang then publishes this verbatim without looking at something quite important - the study *does not* include embedded video players. As she notes in her post

this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos

Without this key piece of data, her study inflates the views and is really an apples-to-oranges comparison. Sites like Blip and Revver use their embedded player all over, yet neither shows on her list in the Top10.

Color me skeptical.

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