Funny as how they are running out of marketing ideas to engage audience. in this day and age with SEO and social network sites they options are endless to engage audience and more effectively target the network who will most likely buy your product or use your service. I was attempting to ship my car overseas and ran into Auto Shipping Network website and was amazed on how they managed to utilize this method so effectively. See for yourselves at http://www.autoshippingnetwork.com/ .
No more coping other companies!!!

All of this talk of “social media” and “realtime” obscures the change in the dynamics of decision making. People have more choices than ever. There will always be someone out there who is younger, smarter, faster, hungrier than you. Therefore, you must out-think the others, because the real secret of the new world order is how important game theory has become.

If you don’t believe me, then consider why a Web 2.0 luddite like Rupert Murdoch is making such a powerful impact on (1) Hulu.com, (2) the conversation surrounding freemium/paywall, etc. It is because Murdoch understands game theory and even if he doesn’t Tweet he understands the value of market signals.

And, if you don’t believe in Rupert Murdoch, just wait a few years.

Facebook is clearly a platform and drives a massive community. But doesn’t Twitter as well? The difference between Facebook and Twitter is:

1. The nature of the social connection (follower vs. friend)
2. The accessibility of their data (open vs trying to become more open)
3. The relevance of their data outside the context (twitter is relevant, FB not so much)

If I looked at the same criteria for yelp: (1) more like twitter, (2) closed? (3) more relevant than twitter perhaps.

So, it seems to be a platform you need to be open and relevant out of context? Does that mean if Yelp decided to open everything via APIs and enable Apps that they would become a platform?

Sorry to be dense, but I think it’s a very interesting idea. Just not sure there’s enough clear criteria to quite grasp the differences. Thanks for the thoughtful post.

For example – what’s the context of this observation? What made you think of it? What are some examples of the old way of out computing, and who isn’t being smart now? How can I debate the premise of your observation and/or learn anything from this without examples and a valid argument?

-Russ

I love your phrase: “the very heart of strategy rests on the value creation question, who does it, why, by what means, and how do we do it better and cheaper than the other guy”. I have already been quoting that

I wonder whether Drive the Community is “vastly different”, or if it is actually a modern spin on Porter’s focus strategy? e.g. from the link you provide: “the premise is that the needs of the group can be better serviced by focusing entirely on it”. Now of course there are now new ways to exchange value with that group, but it feels like an extension of Porter to me rather than being completely different as a strategy.

Thanks for this post, I had no idea Twitter had this strategy cued up ready to roll out when they hit that magic number. That’s one hell of a project.

To me, not coming from a developer background, the most interesting part of all of this isn’t what features twitter users prefer to use over others but in fact what it is they’re actually saying. Measuring the sentiment, polarity and frequency of the commentary over the one *billion* tweets through history I bet you could pull out some amazing facts and figures.

Much like how Google reveals its most searched terms once a year, so too could Twitter embark on such an endeavour. Ok, they kind of already do this with their live-feed trend analysis – but long term? We could be looking at a conversational tapestry of modern history!

Very exciting indeed.

Cheers,

James