Comments on: "Search Is A Pencil"

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:51:37 +0000

@ConferenceCoordinator: "facebook, our early impressions were of lonely middle aged women chatting on it"

Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. Facebook started as a college-only closed system. After it spread like wildfire on colleges, Zuckerberg opened it up to select companies, and then to the general public at large. At no stage did it have "lonely middle aged women chatting".

By: Conference Coordinator

Conference Coordinator — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:24:41 +0000

We must be one of the few companies nowadays it seems not really using either of those app’s for real business purposes, there isn’t a chance in hell that we would use something that initially, to us, appeared so cheesey as facebook, our early impressions were of lonely middle aged women chatting on it because they actually had nothing better to do. Not the market we are targeting. Also so much junk and spam plug ins (ok some may call it marketing and advertising but to me its spam)

Twitter seems a lot more business like, like a roaming address book of sorts and I can see the benefits from a time to roi perspective with a network you may build up.

In my humble opinion tho, our seo has become a little easier the last twelve months or so with the explosion of the app’s and to me its because so many people are wasting time using these and not actually doing as much of the productive work they were doing before.

Ignorance is bliss maybe so leave me in peace

By: Artı

Artı — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:54:01 +0000

Yeh, I know we could but then I would be adding to the growing number of Twitter applications. Where would it end? One of my wishes is a single UI and I believe that this has to be Twitter. Imagine if the Facebook UI was reliant on third parties building one using the Facebook API. You would end up with 20 fragmented interfaces with various degress of functionality. Surely this would impact on the overall experience? Applications can be built using Facebook API but Facebook is the single destination. With the best will in the world API rarely cover 100% of available functionality.

By: James MacAonghus

James MacAonghus — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:07:35 +0000

Google is validating Twitter to a small extent by joining it – a number of the product groups have Twitter channels.

By: JG

JG — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:59:19 +0000

@Sheamus: I'm guessing big things will be happening with paper and real pencils in the next decade. Leadpunk, anyone?

In that case, it won't be bad to be #2?

Hehe.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:30:02 +0000

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure you meant to write “move” instead of “movie”, but the paragraph works just fine with either word. I love it when typos do that.

By: Andrew Thomas

Andrew Thomas — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:11:17 +0000

Interesting article. I, like many others, lead a really hectic life but like to try and keep abreast of what is happening in relation to work related stuff, friends and my interests. The problem is as I get older and the amount of information out that gets unmanageable, I have long wished for a tool that enables me to cherry pick what is interesting at a glance. I don't want to have to type keywords into an empty search field. I would much rather have a crowd of trusted people searching on my behalf. And that tool is potentially Twitter. For me it is more than just a pencil. I think the potential of Twitter is enormous but lies away from simply tapping into the stream of consciousness that it facilitates. For one thing it enables the crowd to source really useful information and pass it on. If Twitter could be built around my needs and allow me to find and manage people better, organise my groups and tweets more effectively and 'push' relevant people and content to me (based on my interests) then what a simple and powerful tool that would be. I know I am probably on my own on this but if you would like to see my view of twitter then have a look at this blog post: http://connectedthought.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/my-twitter/

By: matt buck

matt buck — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:48:01 +0000

Kudos for the excellence of your pencil v photoshop analogy. Imagine what would be possible if we combined the two without destroying the uniqueness which allows them to create differently...

(Retreats in thought about the importance of balance in all creative endeavour).

By: marmaraelt

marmaraelt — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:45:46 +0000

I liked to read this article and gained very useful points of view about www world..thanks john..

By: Pádraic Brady

Pádraic Brady — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:41:23 +0000

My problem with the Facebook development is that I have no problem . I don’t have a Facebook account, get along just fine without it, but really enjoy micro-blogging.

Why join a giant ecosystem like Facebook for this with features I’ll never use? Facebook can leverage its existing users maybe, but for everyone else not on Facebook, Twitter and similar small opponents will remain forever popular.

I think that limitation alone will seriously limit Facebook’s competitiveness. Nobody wants a too complex scenario where we need to track multiple micro services to connect to everyone – we already have/had (arguably) that already with social networks. Without a central point of connectedness, only one point can remain commonly popular unless the market segments between divergent user groups.

Twitter has already captured this market, and I doubt Facebook can make much headway against the dominance of a service that creates its own verb: to tweet