Seesmic really seems to be partnering with some high-traffic sites and webservices of which the latest one is Disqus which means Seesmic when from at most a hundred websites (probably much less) to thousands of medium traffic websites/blogs overnight.

This is a good deal for Seesmic for very obvious reasons both in terms of adoption of their service and broader availability and therefore value.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just this week Research in Motion (RIM) the company behind the famous Blackberry announced the launch of their latest high-end smartphone and created a special micro-portal for those enthusiasts curious about the features and looks of the device.

Also RIM announced with Thompson Reuters that they now have a $150 million dollar investment fund for developers building applications for Blackberry.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you decided to come let us know by commenting and we can catch up for a pint and a laugh afterwards.

See you there!

Have you heard of the (London) Social Media Cafe? Lloyd Davis has been hosting a funky new social in the mornings for the last month or so and I have been meaning to come down for weeks.

I have heard from others including SpinVox rep and blogging machine James Whatley (aka Whatleydude) that it was a good time and that I should come down. James put his money or at least his employers money where his mouth is and sorted out this weeks sponsorship by getting SpinVox to support the event. Thanks James I know Lloyd (from his posts) has been anxious to get some support and I assume he really appreciates it.

Anyway I must get ready as I am already running behind so I won’t even get there until 10:30… Eek. If you are interested and want to learn more about the event come and check out the Wiki and sign up right there and then.

Cheers
Roger
Call/Text me +447886739200

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter recently published their ’semi-monthly’ newsletter on what is new with Twitter and some interesting stories of how Twitter has been used.

This month was particularly interesting because Twitter has been the source of much of the conversations this month in the blogosphere due to another service disruption over the April long-weekend.

Also Twitter management fired their lead architect Blaine Cook who was responsible for making Twitter scale. Clearly this should be not a surprise if you consider how often Twitter has gone down when compared to other companies that grew at similar rates.

Biz Stone also announced they have effectively hired two replacements

John Kalucki is an experienced distributed systems architect well versed in relational messaging as the former co-founder of San Francisco based SQLstream. Steve Jenson is a familiar face for a few of us here at Twitter HQ because he’s a former Google software engineer known for his work scaling Blogger and Blogspot–a service which tens of millions of people use on a regular basis.

Clearly Twitter HQ felt there was a need to not only fix the problem but bolster public opinion and confidence that Twitter will in fact put their instability issues to bed once and for all.

Does Twitter’s instability really bother you?

I was reading this great blog post and I am strongly considering going down this path.  If you read it and agree with his suggestions then let me know.

Basically is blog post suggests that blogging less can mean a higher quality of articles and more reader enjoyment. 

Do you think you would enjoy TechWinter more if we blogged less and kept writing those bigger more interesting pieces once or twice a week?

Examples of the type of articles we would focus on:

Bloggers are you making money

Clickpass Peter Nixey interview with Roger Kondrat

Your feedback is very important. Have a great day.

This is the third time I have had blogger fatigue in the last month and its a real struggle to blog or focus on blogging.  

You may wonder Roger is it because you are not sure what to write… Nope.  I know exactly who I want to write about, I just don’t want to write at all regardless of the topic.

I am going to take today off.  Going to leave work early and grab a book to read on my patio.  The weather is pretty nice here in the UK and I think I need to get outside and enjoy some sun.

Apologies to everyone that reads TechWinter regularly as there are not likely to be any further articles today. 

Today Seesmic announced they have built a Wordpress plugin that allows for video comments.  Recently Seesmic had made this capability available to big sites such as TechCrunch (an investor in Seesmic) and they have been using it for a few days now.  

As this is very new there has not been much to say other than it exists and that I hope it works well for the Seesmic team.

This is just silly though really, do they really think they have the ‘chops’ to keep up with Disqus et al?

For me I seem to still be asking the same question, what is Seesmic doing that is important to users?  What is their purchase of Twhirl have to do with anything strategic? When will they come out of private beta?  Are they trying to compete with Disqus and CoComment now?

Ever heard of MyKinda?  Well they ‘were’ a “Blog Network” startup out of Romania that due to their early association with Sam Sethi got loads of negative press from TechCrunch and their relatives.

Well looks like they are gone (and I am the last to find out).  Apparently TechCrunch covered it in February, which makes sense since they only have their homepage and all other instances of their website are gone. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Peter Nixey and I sat down and enjoyed a chat about ClickPass his new venture and how his move from the UK to Silicon Valley impacted them.

Peter is a great guy and definitely had lots of great wisdom to pass along from his experiences both recently and more generally.

Read the rest of this entry »