So, ten days ago Tweetup was announced to HUGE fanfare. Tweetup of course being the ‘pay per view’ advertising model launched by the guys who created GoTo (that became Overture and defined the pay per click models we see today.) In some corners of the press this was seen as THE new game changer for advertising on Twitter.

I was one of the first thousand to sign up to see what was going on. Ten days later, the answer is – not much. Their first newsletter talks positively about developments and the odd SNAFU (would that be Twitter launching their own advertising model?) But no word on when we go live. I wasn’t convinced when it launched and I remain unconvinced.

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Just a quick note for my friends in Suffolk. This Tweetup has nothing to do with our tweetup meeting which has been going a lot longer than this. I personally think this company is a poor choice. I get the Tweet-Up element of getting your profile to the top of the list but the tweetup of meetups has been quite well established in our vocabulary for some time.

A short thought:

Brands are historically slow to catch on to new ideas. With the odd exception, many brands will wait and see or wait for the masses to come before jumping in. Web 2.0, Twitter, Social Media were all very well established before the brands started paying real attention and investing real time and energy into them.

So, with the fad of ‘checking in’ growing through the likes of foursquare, Gowalla and Miso how long will it be until brands are asking you to ‘check in’ with them? And will this come as late, and be as cringeworthy as brands picking up the ‘my’ tag a little too late?

Call me cynical…

There is a new mobile ‘phone war happening, and its not just between handset manufacturers. In the past when mobile phones were being bought the questions were around style (remember the ‘clamshell’? ) and what the ‘phone would do .. Bluetooth, Tri Band etc. But now I believe these are changing to what can be done on the ‘phone. Applications that are freely available on computers and the web are now being touted as USP’s for a particular ‘phone brand. Take the UK network 3. Their promotions revolve around tools we take for granted online as being ‘free’ on their platform including Google Maps and Windows Live Messenger.

Furthermore, the latest promotions from Nokia, a company that has been struggling without a ‘hit’ smartphone (read Om Malik’s, “The iPhone & Nokia’s Troubles, By the Numbers“) has been not about the handsets but about what you can do with the handsets. This in the form of their OVI Store promotions which are taking full advertising on and offline (including TV spots) to promote what you can do, rather than their latest ‘phone.You may recall the OVI store launch being riddled with problems which will not have helped Nokia’s fortunes.

The big battle that I see is the iPhone vs. Google Android in which the number of apps available has been one of the benchmarks for comparison. Some put the numbers at 1m + apps for iphone, 100,000 for Android. Certainly, as a user of both ‘phones the number of apps available on the iphone and the ease of access [to these apps] on the iphone far outstrips the Android which is one of the main reasons I use the Android less than the iPhone.

The App as the Hookor ‘The Killer App’

The concept of the ‘Killer App’ is not a new one but one I feel is particularly relevant here. Nokia is trialling a free version of Shazam, the mobile music recognition software in the hope it will drive additional music interest and resultant sales of music on Nokia handsets. Music again is the promotion for the newishly released Spotify apps for iphone and Android. The app, limited to premium customers is one potential killer app that could generate interest in new mobile phones. I personally feel a smart move would be for a provider (Handset, Operating System or Network) to subsidise the premium Spotify price to gain market share, much in the same way as Nokia is doing with Shazam. However vested interests of music sales for most players (except Google) means such a tactic may not happen. Putting music to one side, the principle remains strong if there is a new killer app that will kick start interest in mobile ‘phone sales.

The Concept of App Loyalty

As the market matures, or in the interests of gaining customers one has to pay attention to App Loyalty. If the app becomes ‘the thing’ then each platform will need to have the common tools offered by others. Let me explain, I have an iPhone and a Hero (Android.) On my iPhone I love:

1. Tweetie for Twitter
2. Portfolio Live for tracking stocks
3. Evernote for filing
4. Spotify for Music
5. Flight Control for games

Which ones can I get on Adroid?

1. Twitdroid is as close as I can get, but not nearly as good
2. I cannot find a decent portfolio manager
3. I have to use a PixelPipe ‘hash’ version which requires a Pixelpipe account (I don’t have one)
4. Yes, and its great
5. No, I can’t find anything close

Now one of the issues with this is finding the apps. The app store Market on the Android is poor with little visibility of all the available apps, few categories in broad brush strokes like ‘finance’ which covers everything from mortgage calculators to tip calculators and share price tools. Trying to research these on the website for Android is equally hard as only a handful of apps are displayed. Furthermore the quality of some of these apps is questionable which,without better filtering brings down the overall quality of the market.All is not lost, however, there are some great apps for Android (I like the WiFi Analyser) but I find them through trial and error rather than a pleasurable shopping experience.Larva Labs post a great article covering more of the Market’s shortcomings.

If for final evidence, if you will, of the importance of apps it is the revenue they generate. GigaOm estimate Apple sells $2.4 billion worth of apps every year in their store. If Apple retain 30% of the sale value (says Infobeans) that would equate to around 15% of their 2008 profits. Something not to be sniffed at.

I was delighted to receive this letter in the post. As an RAC member, I had opted not to receive any further promotional literature about other RAC services.

The letter I received noted that I had asked not to receive such information and that “normally we wouldn’t but…” OK STOP. but…? You either respect my wishes or you don’t?

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The letter then goes on to advise me that their ‘carefully selected panel’ will find me the cheapest car insurance price and that if I need anything just call.

So, it looks like a marketing message, it smells like a marketing message….. It is a marketing message !

Good thing they respect my wishes. What next, “well, we usually come and get you from the side of the road, but….”

These are my links for May 31st through June 1st:

• Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web. – Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.
• Micro Persuasion: Visits to Twitter Search Soar, Indicating Social Search Has Arrived – According to data from Compete.com visits to the Twitter search page grew more than 400% in the last six months. This sub-domain alone recorded 2.7M unique visitors in April, up from just shy of 536,000 in October. Even more remarkable, traffic to the site, which is tucked away, grew 24% in April.
• Freshen me up – A nice blog about stuff…
• 100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds | cheth Studios – As the Title suggests these are the Best designed, kickass Twitter Backgrounds! I know that I cannot make justice to this I might have missed out some great ones, so do comment and let us know!
• Monday Note – media, tech and business stories – A potentially interesting blog
• Revealed: where Google’s data centres are around the world | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Analysis of data released by Google shows where its data centres – the places that keep it going .
• Zivity » The home of independent artists, models and rock-stars. GET EXPOSED. – A social network for artists, models & musicians. By paying a $10 subscription one gets the ability to view great work and vote whilst generating micro income for content providers. So fr the majority of the images on the homepage (I have not subscribed) include scantily clad females..
• New Economics of Advertising: 101 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals – Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. Anyone can use it to expand their social circle, promote their side business, keep their coursework organized, and more. Whether you want to achieve your Twitter goals, or just use it as a tool to achieve others, these tools will help you get there.

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

These are my bookmarks for May 12th from 11:09 to 14:03:

• ThisNext – Recommend, Share and Discover Great Products! – Looks like a place you can shop for inspiration and generally be part of a community.
• Brochure Templates, PDF Templates, Indesign Templates, Graphic Designs – BrochureReady – magazine design templates
• YippieMove – Email transfers made easy – Whether you want to change email providers or you just want to make archive copies, YippieMove can help. We’ll transfer your email between whichever email providers you choose.
• IABUK : Mobile ad market worth £28.6 million in 2008 – Expenditure on mobile advertising in the UK exceeded market expectation in 2008 to reach a total of £28.6 million, according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

These are my links for May 8th through May 11th:

• google-email-uploader – Google Code – The Google Email Uploader is a desktop utility for Microsoft Windows that uploads email and contacts from other desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. The Email Uploader preserves information such as sent dates and sender/recipient data, as well as the folder structure used by the other email program. The Google Email Uploader requires a Google Apps account.The Email Uploader is Apache 2.0 licensed open source software, and is governed by the terms of the included license file. This means you may modify the tool to better suit your needs.
• .PST Import Tool for Entourage – Official Microsoft software to import .pst files directly into Entourage on the Mac.
• Import .PST files – Entourage doesn’t provide direct support for PST files, as this is a Windows Outlook file format. Entourage won’t be able to read your PST files directly, but there are tools and methods available to import PST files into Entourage.
• Best practices for scalable, high performance systems « Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo – So here goes, 8 tips for making your system high performant and scalable:
• Aerial Photography: Airview Image & Stock Photo Service: Australia – Airviewonline is the stock image library of Airview Aerial Photography. Through this easy to use site, you will be able to search, purchase and download from a vast collection of aerial images. Currently the library contains 10331 aerial photos, and many more photos of Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere are being added daily. Check back regularly to see where the Airview team have been recentl
• Connecting the Dots: Twitter GMail Gadget Useful Elsewhere -
• 10 Firefox Add-ons for Web Designers | 10 Volt Media Blog – With a plethora of add-ons and extensions, created for developers by developers, Firefox becomes much more than just a browser and turns into an essential part of your toolbox.
• wordpress mail plugins – wordpress plug ins that help mail content
• Tweets From Space: NASA Turns To Twitter And YouTube To Reconnect With The Public – NASA has recently been making a big push in using modern consumer technology, the web, and social sites to reach a broader audience. Yesterday it launched a collection of very impressive Photosynth galleries of the ISS and Mars Rover
• Google Does TV Ads, To Push Chrome Browser In Commercials – It’s a first for Google. The company has never directly advertised one of its products on television in the US, though they have been mentioned in conjunction with ads from Google partners, such as T-Mobile pushing its “G1 with Google” Android phone.
• Setup your Own URL Redirection Service with Google Short Links – TinyURL Clone – You can consider setting up your own URL shortening service that will run on your own domain (or web server) and the short URLs will therefore resolve throughout the lifespan of your site.
• Stupeflix – Video creation made easy – Welcome – create videos from still photos in minutes
• Download Free Repeat Patterns – free repeat patterns – good for backgrounds etc.
• Twitter Search To Crawl Links & Add Ranking Algorithm – Cool changes coming to Twitter Search from News.com reports Twitter will be improving Twitter Search to index content beyond Twitter.com by crawling links within Twitter posts and also by adding a ranking algorithm to the search results.
• Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results | Webware – CNET – Twitter Search will become a lot more useful soon, the microblogging site’s new vice president of operations said Wednesday night.

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• TinyUrl Traffic Doubled Since Last Year (livecrunch.com)
• Google’s plans for Android’s YouTube (news.cnet.com)

My last post made me chuckle at the sheer chutzpa of marketing departments. Back in the eighties when you were frowned upon for taking ‘two bottles into the shower’ Wash & Go became a well known brand (is it still?) and was clearly succesful. So succesful in fact that the brand owners decided to do a shampoo on its own.

The brand, ‘Wash and Go Solo’ – Genius! Quite why they never called it just ‘Wash’ was a mystery to me..