Did You That Thing I Sentcha, Biz? [New Hires]

Word comes via the Twitter Blog today that they’ve made a new hire, another one that has a sharp eye on how the quickly exploding status micro-blogging service can make some money, mostly with respect to the mobile business.

At first, I took it as a sign that I’d been passed over for that position I applied for a few weeks ago, the product manager position that everyone was talking about just before Christmas (you know, the one that finally said to the world “we’re serious about making some money.”). I’m happy, that upon further reading, I’m finding that the job I originally applied for is still open.

As most of you know, I’m currently gig-less. It was serendipitous, I thought, that the position opened up on almost the same exact day that I became a free agent.  I figured they were actually creating a position for me over there, and didn’t have my number, so the only way they could get my attention was to get everyone else in the blogosphere to forward me the job opening (something that happened about six times, actually).

For those of you who’ve just read my stuff at the various places I’ve posted in the past, while you know that I’ve certainly got quite a few opinions on how to monetize Twitter and an intimate familiarity with the service, you may not know that I’m also a qualified veteran of startup executive management. I’ve been a C<insert-letter>O of no less than five startups in the last several years, at least two of which had yearly revenue in the millions.

What Would I Do for Twitter?
If you’re interested in all that stuff, though, you’d be at my LinkedIn profile. I’ve talked about a number of ways to monetize Twitter, and certainly the new guy, Kevin Thau, looks like he might have an inside track on how to do that on the mobile level.  I worked on the SMS spec back in 1999, but that doesn’t make me an expert personally on how to create carrier relationships that benefit the content aggregator, so I don’t presume to know more than Kevin in that area (though I do have a number of friends who are absolute experts in that part of the business).

My experience and interest lies in the content side of things.  Twitter has become a conversational tool, in the sense that IM is a conversational tool.  Still, it still has a ton of aspects that still bear striking similarities to it’s original intent, which is as a type of blogging utility.

In that sense, I’ve extensively case-studied a number of different ways to leverage branding and tight knit “tribes,” as Godin calls them, to get a bit of cash and monetization out of it on the user level.

To that end, if I’m able to find angles that make Twitter a worthwhile activity on the user level (for the user) monetarily, replicating that out to the rest of the community shouldn’t be that big of a struggle.

Without going into a 30-page treatise, a lot of my ideas revolve around the same thoughts that YouTube has involved with their Partner Program, and I’ve expounded on these principles many times in the past.

How Serious is this Post?
I’ve occasionally written a tongue-in-cheek post, so you may be wondering how serious I am about asking for this job.  The truth is, I live in Texas and I’m not looking to re-locate. This job is, presumably, not a telecommute job.

On the other hand I do have a few jobs that, even though I’ve got some good projects going and opportunities I’m closing in on, I think I’d drop just about everything else for, and making Twitter profitable is one of those jobs.

I’m definitely outside the bubble, though. The Twitter guys know who I am (we conversed several times in blog comments), but I don’t know them or most of the Silicon Valley circle well enough to say that I’d have a real shot at the job.

So on the seriousness level, I’d say this post ranks about a six or seven of ten. I’d like the job, and I’d make the effort to convince my family it’s worth uprooting us and heading West for. I’m not banking on it though, and won’t be heartbroken should someone else get the job.

I will seriously consider, should I not get the job, selling all future blogposts on Twitter monetization to Twitter as eBooks – no more free advice!

Transpera Signs On MSNBC and The Weather Channel

The last time I spoke to Frank Barbieri was at the beginning of this summer, where I spoke with him and the CEO of ManiaTV, Peter Hoskins, and talk about their (then) new partnership.

Frank is the CEO of Transpera, a company that specializes in taking video from online and standard media outlets and customizing advertising services for content producers on the mobile platform.

Transpera at the time had a decent New Media portfolio, but has since added what can best be described as a crapload of Old Media partners, including Associated Press, CBS News, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, MTV Networks, and the Travel Channel. Add to that their New Media partners, and you’ve got a mile long list.

I spoke very briefly with Frank yesterday afternoon, and he told me that they’d been focusing almost exclusively on Old Media partners since we’d last spoken to really bulk up the volume of content they handle (and presumably because there’s very little left for them to conquer in the New Media world).

As a result of that focus, with the signing of MSNBC and The Weather Channel, he says that they’ve now partnered with every major network.

We’ll Be Exploiting Frank’s Expertise Later this Week
If you get the chance to hit play up above on the old show, you’ll see that valuable and interesting analysis comes very easy to Frank our discussion, and that’s something we hope to replicate this Wednesday when I sit down with him to talk a bit about what these new partnerships mean, and how the video startup and advertising world has shifted in the last six months.

What I mean by that is best exemplified by something I saw at NTV today in an article by Liz Gannes, where she said: “… it doesn’t seem like online content studios are going to fade out of existence anytime soon. That’s for one simple reason, and it’s not massive profit margins: they keep finding true believers to give them more money.”

Transpera isn’t a content studio, and they haven’t raised a whole lotta money lately to stay solvent (to the best of my knowledge), but the statement is indicative of a general malaise that seems to have beset all ad-supported media, and I want to get a handle on how that’s affect strategic planning and the industry as a whole from Frank on Wednesday.

If you have any questions along those lines, leave them in the comments and we’ll include them in the show.

Is Your Congressman Social?

TechCrunch today is cashing in on the high volume of political chatter today in the wake of President Bush’s exit press conference today by asking with the headline today: “Is your senator on YouTube?”

Erick Schonefield there talks about two new directories that YouTube has launched that allow you to find your Senator and your Congressman, if they’re on the site putting out videos.

I was at Alex Muse’s happy hour down at the Infomart last week, and met up with Squeejee’s Chris McCroskey, who’s been working on a similar project with relationship to Twitter.

Their directory is called Tweet Congress, and essentially performs the same function for Twitter as YouTube’s new hub. You simply enter your zip code, and it’ll pop up all the congressmen from your area, and if applicable, their Twitter address.

It’s an odd transition from the debates politicos seemed to be having about social media just a few scant months ago. Back in July, I covered (along with several other tech and political bloggers) the goal of censoring Twitter and other social media presences by some in Congress through the use of obscure franking and postal rules.

Very soon after it became clear from the press coverage in the blogosphere that this was a decision that would not pass muster with the public, Representative Michael Capuano quickly changed his tune on his intent no longer being to censor (even though he was suddenly becoming interested in enforcing these rules that would have that same net effect).

Suddenly, though, since the election of Barack Obama, it seems that social media has received authentication somehow, and if you’re inside the beltway, you’re suddenly uncool if you don’t at least understand what’s going on in the tubes.

Odd how things work, but if there is one good thing (heh – from my perspective, anyway) to come out of Barack Obama being elected president, that might be it: social media savvy being considered a required skill.

Nielson Tracking More Accurately with Audio

Those of us who have been producing video content for a while now know the problem of coming up with accurate metrics for not only our own edification but for the purposes of turning around and selling those metrics to sponsors and advertisers.  Neilson has been an Old Media institution that from very early on in the podcasting revolution has been interested in making sure they not only had a handle on all this new technology, but strove to find more accurate ways to measure a complete audience, no matter how the media is being consumed.

Andy Plesser, over at Beet.TV, sat down with Jon Gibs (the VP of Media analytics over at Nielson) to discuss a new method of tracking viewership of online video through the use of audio signature files (video of the interview below).

It basically comes down to this: the same file may be on YouTube, Hulu, NBC.com or any other number of sites where the file can pirated, copied or otherwise syndicated may not be counted for the totals, particularly if the syndication was done by a ‘fan’ and not the content originator.

Twitter is the New MySpace [You’re Doing it Wrong]

Guest poster Atherton Bartelby at Mashable listed on Tuesday 10 reasons why he will refuse to follow you on Twitter. Aside from the very annoying fact the article attempts to tell me that there’s a right way for me to use Twitter, reason number three in particular stuck in my craw:

#3: Your “website” listed is a MySpace Profile

…or, far worse, an AngelFire “page.”

I’ll admit it: I had a MySpace profile…until I deleted it a year ago when it became obvious that only teenagers and musicians were still using it. I also had a GeoCities/AngelFire “page”…for my very first website when I first got on the Internet in 1994. If the Twitter user in question happens to be an actual teenager, or musician whose MySpace presence truly works for them, then fine. But I tend to pass over those users whose proffered web presence is, well, clearly doing it wrong.

It doesn’t take much these days to establish a web presence that seems genuine and thoughtful, and appears to intend to attract and build an online community based on the content it provides. AngelFire pages simply don’t communicate that.

After glancing over the rest of them, he could have more or less just skipped all the ten reasons and said “if it looks like a fake or sales and marketing related user, I’m not going to follow your account.

But the dig at MySpace fails to notice one key element of Twitter that it seems most of us aren’t noticing at the moment: Twitter is the new MySpace.

Back in 2006, I launched an experimental video podcast network that used MySpace as the primary thrust of it’s marketing.  The content was very high-brow (as compared to what’s typically thought of as MySpace content), being accessible hacker-centric technology news and general commentary on world affairs.

Using the system to find folks to subscribe to our podcast was surprisingly easy, and we grew our download and viewer-count to over 60,000 a month.

If you look at even more recent history, a primary fixture on the Mashable site layout were places to download MySpace templates. Some of the most popular features on the site, at least by comment counts, continue to be MySpace related list posts.

So what’s the great sin in having a MySpace profile as your primary point of contact? Chances are if it’s listed, it’s because it’s worked for that user. If you’re going to discount out of hand a Twitter user because they list a MySpace profile for their primary point of contact, it’s going to be you who ends up out of touch with most of the web’s userbase, not them.

In short, you’re doing it wrong.

Picasa Better Than iPhoto? Yes, Still.

Mashable’s brand spanking new Associate Editor Jennifer Van Grove on Tuesday declared iPhoto to be awesome and Google’s Picasa to officially suck eggs.

If this was based on something that made sense I’d just let it slide, but she lists the following features as the ingredients of the new killer app:

Face Detection, Face Recognition, and Places - tagging faces, names, and places in iPhoto for online sharing turns into an almost completely automated process … slideshow themes, smart albums, the ability to auto-create titles, transitions, and credits, and even a Places feature for animated travel maps that uses GPS geotagging.

Given that Picasa has had almost all of these features for months now, though, I wouldn’t call that exactly groundbreaking or anything.

Here are two things that are groundbreaking: Picasa just came out for Mac, and Picasa continues to be free. iPhoto still costs money.

Which one is better, now?

Are Intel and Adobe Killing Video Podcasts?

Caught a story Tuesday afternoon from NewTeeVee that, as Chris Albrecht put it, could be one of the dominant stories for 2009 in web technology if people pay attention and all the dominoes fall the right way.

The crux of it is technology announced Tuesday by Intel and Adobe that brings web video to the livingroom in a seamless way:

Intel and Adobe announced today that they are collaborating to bring Flash to the Intel CE 3100 Media Processor, a move the two companies say would provide a better, more seamless web video viewing experience on your HDTV. The new Flash-enabled chips are set to roll out before the middle of the year and will be found in CE 3100-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray disc players, digital TVs and other AV devices.

The idea here is that the TV itself (not the TV plus a box plugged into your TV) becomes the platform itself. Widgets run on it, web video runs on it, and you just plug it into the ‘Net and watch it go.

It sorta makes me question the technology I’ve been harping on for ages now, and gravely emphasizes the fact that I need to start reading up on this new technology to determine exactly how widespread, common and disruptive this will be.

I’ve been preaching the word of Media RSS and podcasting for as long as people have been putting MP4s in RSS enclosure tags. For me, it was the only technology neutral way to prepare for your content being widely distributed into the mainstream.

It now appears that I may be wrong, or at least that this new technology may rise to dominance (and even eclipse video podcasting) before video podcasting has a chance to take root.

Who here has read up on this stuff?  As you know, my connection has been sort of dimmed lately, so I haven’t had a chance to do all the research I’d like.  I’m going to get on it, but in the meantime, what do you know about this?