Respect networks, and use caution when sharing cross channels.

Integrating your own product and services with others is one of the most interesting and value-adding effects, which we may want to credit the free and open internet culture for. More or less all major products out there have APIs which allows for interesting cross-pollination. 

One of the most simple and most frequently used integrations is enabling options to share content created in one product into other products. This is especially true to “social media content” such as posting this article from Tumblr into Twitter, or pushing images from Instagram into Facebook. There are great benefits from this and the previous examples plus many others makes sense.

However, some of the content is very specific to it’s channel and sometimes one should stop and think about the context of how the information is presented if you push it into other channels.

FourSquare is an excellent example of a great product where I have a small selection of FourSquare friends, who all actively and explicitly have asked to be notified about my checkins. They have acknowledge to see my regular checkins in my regular everyday life, such as my office, home, grocery store, or maybe even health club. But should I really bother my Facebook friends or Twitter followers with this? Or even when becoming mayor of the local coffee store or receiving a badge for eating a lot of sushi? In the non-FourSquare context this information is irrelevant and uninteresting. Everybody knows I should be at work on Tuesday, so why post it the checkin outside of FourSquare? And gamification badges and mayorships makes no sense to non-FourSquare users. These virtual achievements have no bragging rights in other channels, and rather becomes spam content in a Facebook-type environment. 

TripIt is another beautiful service, where a small group of people within this specific channel have asked to see my current and upcoming travel plans. Details on flight number and exact itinerary is very granular and uninteresting for most. But pushing that content outside of TripIt into is confusing, and could easily appears like bragging. I automatically and carefully publish my TripIt trips into LinkedIn, as I travel extensively in my job and that gives me a great exposure to meet people in regions I only visit occasionally.

There are a ton of other examples, and Facebook and Twitter are very much the central feeds of amazing content created across various products and services. That’s part of the charm and so it should remain. But one should use caution and never forget about context. Respect the networks you have created within each channel, and ask yourself why you need you share outside of that. 

(and of course this post was published on Twitter… ;))

eBoys: outdated and shameful?

I just finished Randall E. Stross’ book about the founders of Benchmark Capital and the high days in the late nineties - eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work. This book was interesting and illustrated some important decisions made by initial investments in for example eBay.

However, a book about early investments published in year 2000 lacks the ending we all have experienced including a bursting bubble and the worst recession since the 1930’s. 

While reading about the huge potential about the investment case of Webvan I was just waiting for the inside reactions and decisions faced when the business model didn’t live up to its expectations. Unfortunately the book finished in the time when Webvan was still a huge success and was about to take over the world and change the way we see retail. Today we know Webvan didn’t change anything except making its investors pockets’ smaller.

This is the problem with printed books. You cannot edit nor adjust nor complement with new facts. I wouldn’t have removed any sections of the book, but I would love to read the following chapters which to me is more interesting! Today Benchmark doesn’t mention the Webvan case on their website. Are they ashamed? I would assume the lost capital must come with many lessons learned and shouldn’t be something you need to hide of… even if it is rated as one of the biggest investments losses of all time. 

And by the way, other books have experienced a similar fate of outdated and changed realities. One example is Jim Collin’s highly rated and excellent book Good to Great where you read about the outstanding company Fannie May, which went from good to great to… disaster. 

But hey, if you never speak you don’t exist!