Tag Archive for 'Biz Stone'

Can we move as one using social media? Twitter’s Biz Stone thinks so.

Published on November 25, 2010 in Twitter, business, mobile, politics, social media, technology and video. View Comments

Here’s an interesting recent video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

One point grabbed me as I was listening to the interview. He says:

One particular event opened our eyes to what we had on our hands. That was in March of 2007 at a festival called South by South West….We had about 75,000 users at that point and many of the people at the festival were using Twitter, and this was the first time we were able to see Twitter in the wild, so to speak. And there were a couple of things that happened at that festival that made us realize that people were using our service to come together and move as one…We rushed right back to San Francisco and formed Twitter Incorporated.

I find this interesting in the light of my recent thoughts on what a global civilization, aided by an increasingly social web, might start to look like. Is it possible that sometimes (only sometimes) we may be able to use the social web to come together and act as one, on a larger scale than anything previously achieved? Twitter has certainly become a lot bigger since then.

HaHa, Twitter Movie Trailer! [parody video]

Published on August 12, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, blogging, social media and video. View Comments

Well by now you’ve probably seen the trailer for the much anticipated, and apparently quite dark, movie about the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. Now comes a new spoof (there are others) of The Social Network trailer, complete with an excellent parody soundtrack.

The Twit Network trailer relentlessly lampoons Twitter’s flood of minutiae from people’s everyday lives. It begins with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey having a conversation with a friend which goes “I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall”. “Why”. “Because normal blogging is tedious and dumb and leads to fully formed ideas”.  I’m sure you get the picture. It’s funny :)

The parody trailer also begs the question, if  The Social Network turns out to be a box office success, will we one day see a feature film about Twitter too?

On a side note, as you can see from the tweet below, which is a quote from the video trailer, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone seems to think it’s funny too.

Biz Stone Twitter

via Mashable

Old Spice Guy raises the bar on Twitter marketing with personalized video replies.

Published on July 13, 2010 in Twitter, business, social media and video. View Comments

Okay, I like this, it’s good marketing. It’s the kind of marketing people actually like, which is uncommon to say the least.

Following the hugely popular and entertaining Old Spice 30 sec commercial (which really proves that to be viral or contagious it just has to be good), the Old Spice Guy is currently replying to well known people on Twitter with funny, personalized videos. The videos are getting a big kick-along with the addition of a paid Old Spice Promoted Trending Topic.

Old Spice Twitter Promoted Trending Topic

So far the video replies are mostly to influential and popular people and blogs, such as Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Perez Hilton, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Alyssa Milano, Jason Calacanis and many others, even to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Needless to say, tweets and links to videos are being passed around Twitter at an incredible rate. They are of course being embedded in many blogs too, including this one.

This is one of the best paid campaigns I’ve seen so far on Twitter (and YouTube). The copywriter(s) involved must be having a a lot of fun writing the quick response videos too!

World’s fastest growing search engine? Twitter!

Published on July 7, 2010 in Google, Twitter, business, social media and technology. View Comments

According to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Twitter now handles around 800 million search queries per day, or more than 24 billion per month. This is a massive 33% more than it said it was handling back in April.

To put that into some perspective, Google reaches around 88 billion per month, so it’s pretty impressive that Twitter has already moved well past a quarter of that. In addition, Bing only achieves around 4.1 billion and Yahoo around 9.4 billion per month.

So as well as being an information network (as Stone prefers to call it), it seems that Twitter is now the world’s fastest growing search engine. It’ll be very interesting to see how much revenue they manage to pull in with their new Promoted Tweets initiative on search. Although quite different, Google has certainly done fairly well out of search advertising!

Twitter Search

via Fast Company