Archive for the ‘business’ Category

how businesses should be using social networks indeed

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

The point to remember about the current frenzy over social networks is that this period of innovation is equivalent to the introduction of Netscape in 1995. We are at the very beginning of the social, interconnected, people-centered Web. It’s the Stone Age of the social graph. We are just beginning to create useful tools for living in the digital age, mapping the human social genome into the virtual world. It’s a period of experimentation and creativity, and the surfacing of issues such as who owns your digital profile, virtual anonymity, identity standards, open networks, the intersection of 3D virtual worlds and social networks and how businesses should be using social networks… [ZDNet]

This is a fantastic insight and a great analogy to make. Social networking is going to creep out into our lives and redefine human socialization. The question that we’re asking at BigTreeTop is how do individuals and businesses understand each other’s roles in this space? Commerce is an integral part of all of our lives, whether you trade stocks, barter your school lunch items, buy groceries or sell gold in an MMO. BigTreeTop is starting simple, but I see it as a platform for the consumer/business relationship.

Starting Up - the Metaphor

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Working on a startup feels like you’re standing at the edge of the ocean at high tide. The work piles up. You have 17 programs open on your computer and each browser has 20+ tabs. Your attention has the staying power of a fly in the rain. The work crescendos, crashes, drenches your being and then, suddenly, pulls back. Calmness floats in like fog in the bay. The calm is just the build up of the next wave. The calm is the next wave of work sucking up material render its abundant potential energy into kinetic force. The next wave of work is growing before you’ve had a moment to catch you breath, to orientate yourself. And then it crests and crashes and pulls back and grows again.

Does one try to escape the waves by traveling up the beach or out, into the water, beyond the shore? What does the metaphor suggest?