Pownce: Like Twitter But With Groups
I blogged about Pownce earlier this week and got an invite from the awesome Bryan Pearson today (many thanks!).
I’ve gone through my six invites, so bug Wayne Porter, Jim Kukral, Shawn Collins or Scott Jangro if you’d like to try and grab one as well.
What I love about Pownce (so far) is the ability (option) to communicate with either a selected group of people or everyone on my contact list. In many ways, it’s a presence platform like Twitter… but with groups. I think there’s enough differentiation there to make these two useful in their own ways.
I daily email a couple of close friends and business partners, and if they’re on Pownce it eliminates the need for that. I’ll keep experimenting and let you know my thoughts.
If you’re on Pownce already, addd me as a friend if you’d like!
Even More Important Than the iPhone: Gnu GPL v3
It amazes me how few tech geeks who proselytize on Twitter, blogs and podcasts actually use “free” software (free as in freedom, not price point). The “A Listers” are constantly chirping the need for open standards and OpenID’s, yet they love dogmatically follow the Cult of the Mac.
Why aren’t more of the Technorati Top 100 using Ubuntu or OpenSuse or Fedora or an open operating system? If Linux is good enough for Google, you’d figure it’d be good enough for those who love to blog about Google.
But, that’s my rant and it’s beside the point. The GPL v3 is more than just about Ubuntu or Linux OS’s and is a major development in the tech world. The fact that it is being released on iDay is no coincidence…
The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.
Give it a read and consider the long term implications… it’s good for you.
GNU General Public License - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
The iPhonetini
When the iPhone is released unleashed at 6pm today, it will be full swing cocktail hour. What better way to celebrate than an iPhonetini (from Gizmodo)…
2 oz. Vodka
1/2 oz. Apple Pucker Schnapps
1/2 oz. Goldschlager
1/4 oz. Cointreau (or Triple Sec)Combine in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, optionally rimmed with sugar.
Garnish with your old cell phone (or an apple wedge).
Here’s To The IPhone: iPhonetini, a Boozy Tribute to iPhone Day Zero - Gizmodo
The Jesus Phone and Affiliate Parousia
Shawn Collins has put together an interesting experiment in marketing the iPhone, which will be released here in the States to much buzz and excitement this Friday at 6pm.
Although the commissions are only 1% for an iPhone conversion through the Apple Store affiliate program, there is still a goldmine waiting for affiliates and marketers who can create a sticky or viral site to tap into the tangible iPhone buzz.
Here’s Shawn’s creative (which he filmed while on a trip to NYC’s Apple Store on Wednesday)…
The site (jesusphone.info), video and concept are simple and quick… which can often work out to provide the most bang for the marketing bucks. Shawn is effectively doing something revolutionary here that we can all learn from.
In effect, Shawn is filming a short commercial, putting it onto a medium of mass traffic (YouTube) and incorporating a call to response based on both humor, realism and buzz. This would have cost an individual close to six figures just ten years ago. Now, with the ubiquity of YouTube, camera phones and cheap or free video editing software or sites, it’s all available for close to nothing.
And that’s how affiliate marketing will operate in the future, and why I believe affiliate marketing has an incredible chance to thrive and find it’s promise in this exponential growth of technology age.
YouTube - Get the iPhone Online
LinkedIn and StumbleUpon Facebook Apps Released Today
Wow, what a day for and the business community. If you think that Facebook is just a place for college kids to post pics of keg stands or bong hits, you’re sadly mistaken. There’s all sort of buzz about how powerful Facebook is rapidly becoming for business endeavors.
Today, both LinkedIn and StumbleUpon have released Facebook apps that users can incorporate into their profiles. Tres cool. LinkedIn’s app is focused on its job search feature only (meh), but StumbleUpon looks very functional. I’ve found that StumbleUpon makes for stickier and more valuable traffic than Digg or del.icio.us in my own marketing endeavors, so I encourage you to join that platform if you haven’t already.
If you’re on Facebook, connect with me (”samharrelson”) so we can do business 
Google Desktop for LINUX!
I had no idea this was coming out today, and rivals the new look (and folders) of Google Docs & Spreadsheets for me…
Search your computer as easily as you search the web with Google Find information in your documents, emails, web history, and more Open files with just a few keystrokes
There are already a number of great programs in the distro of Linux that I use (Ubuntu) which do what Google Desktop does if you operate within the desktop (especially Beagle). However, since I’m a heavy GMail, Docs and Reader user, having everything synced and searchable on the Linux desktop is fantastic.
Thanks, Google… you made my day.
Freebase Invites
Freebase is a much discussed database mostly aimed at developers. However, there are some interesting metaweb implications in a system such as this. The Wikipedia article describes Freebase as “an open shared database of the worlds knowledge,” and “a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data.”
If you’d like an invite for the Alpha program, I’ve got 5 to share. First come first serve. Email me (sam@costpernews.com), Twitter @samharrelson, IM me, Skype me, call me, Pownce me (oh wait, I’m not cool enough to get an invite there yet) etc etc if you’d like one.
Kevin Rose’s New Presence Platform: Pownce
Kevin Rose is well known for his post-Tech TV startup, Digg, which helped spark a social media/voting revolution.
Now, he’s opened a new platform, Pownce, into private beta. What is Pownce?
Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.
Here’s a screen shot of Kevin’s Pownce profile…
No word yet on whether you’ll be able to do things like aggregate content, bring in your Twitter stream, use as a Facebook app, etc. However, at first glance this seems to be more of a way to share content in as simple a way as possible… much like Twitter tries to do with communication. So, this seems like a communication platform aiming for the “simple is better” mantra instead of a Facebook meta approach to social networking.
There’s already an application (to run on Adobe Air) available for Pownce (which looks a good deal like Twitterific)…
With Kevin’s cult following in the tech/geek community and the potential of having an easy way to share web content with friends, I can see this platform taking off rather quickly and having a ton of buzz surrounding it from the Bay Area bloggers. Pownce seems to make sharing easier… and that’s what good platforms are all about.
TwitterGram and Marketers’ Inabilities to Communicate
Dave Winer, grand poobah of RSS, OMPL and blogging in general, is a big fan of Twitter. Recently, he’s made the astute metaphor of Twitter being a coral reef. Required reading.
Now, he’s put together a little platform called TwitterGram…
A TwitterGram has a title and a small MP3 file. The title explains the gram, it must be no longer than 75 characters, to allow room for the URL of the MP3, which is about 50 characters. The MP3 file may be no larger than 200K, although we won’t reject MP3s that are just a bit bigger than 200K, we’re not saying how much bigger.
I’ve been working on my TwitterGram this morning and will have one posted up soon. What I find interesting about TwitterGram is the continuing evolution of the “presence format.” Whether or not Twitter is a blogging, micro-blogging or instant messaging platform is irrelevant, because the lines and distinctions between these modes of communications have evaporated due to the intense energy from users eager to communicate in paradigms that don’t fit nicely into corporate prescribed boxes.
For instance, Facebook is white hot at the moment because it combines the best of web2.0 with old skool AOL, ICQ and even bulletin boards…not to mention the ability to communicate in an environment bundled with aggregated content from various and scattered places and applications around the web.
Combine something like TwitterGram with Facebook (and Facebook’s mobile platform) and we’re getting close to a form of communication that marketers and advertisers have no idea how to quantify, monetize or mine for data. Marketing is communication, but we professional marketers have made that communication a trickle of its potential as a raging stream due to our inabilities to properly analyze, strategize, monetize and junkerize.
There’s room here for something special in the continued evolution of marketing messages and communication… we just have to figure out how to unlearn everything we’ve been taught in order to make the most (or anything) out of it.
Vinny Lingham in GQ
incuBeta’s Vinny Lingham is featured in this month’s South African GQ in a piece on four South Africans who are making waves and money worldwide (including others such as Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical/Ubuntu fame).
Congrats, Vinny!
