A little lighter fare for this weekend. For people like me who are into their mobile devices, their selection of apps reveals a bit about their personality. I used to get excited to try out new apps, which come out daily. But now, figuring out what screen to put them on stresses me out!

There are now over 25,000 iPhone apps available in the iTunes Store but the iPhone has slots for 148 applications, or 9 screens full of apps. Even if you bought all 25,000 at a cost of US$71,442, many are pointless (Bubblewrap anyone?) And until Apple provides an easy way to manage them, except manually dragging icons around from screen to screen, I’ve become less inclined to experiment with potentially time-sucking apps. Of the 7 screens of apps I have, I’d say screen 2 is by far the most heavily used one. I think I use most of these everyday and some several times a day. My recent post on juggling priorities and availability of various applications on the iPhone help narrow things down to just the essentials above.

Looking at my most heavily used screen, the top row shows that I am a news junkie. Yup, guilty as charged. You might wonder why I have both the NY Times and USA Today apps  and for good reason. The NY Times app until very recently, was pretty crappy and unreliable so I used USA Today as it is much stabler and faster. Plus it has more sharing features, like sending URL’s to text messages or Twitter.

Row 2 tells you that I’m rather food-obsessed with 4 dining apps in the second row, but these are just the tip of the iceberg! I have a whole other screen chock-full of other food-related apps, including one specifically for espresso drinks! OK, enough about that.

The third row is where things get ultra practical — subway schedule/map, flight tracking tool, note taking app and weather. Row 4 is about socializing, from instant messaging to microblogging to full-on blogging. You know, gotta have various ways to kill time in airports, traffic or boring meetings. Not like that ever happens to you now, does it? Maybe I should use that time to figure out what applications to download next.

]]> http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/07/iphone-application-addictions-er-additions/feed/ 0 http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/06/juggling-priorities-email-twitter-facebook-breakfast-rss/ http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/2009/03/06/juggling-priorities-email-twitter-facebook-breakfast-rss/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:01:28 +0000 admin http://www.jasonchan.com/strategy/?p=84 As information sources become more and more numerous, it’s becoming more and more challenging staying on top of things. When I was a kid, my dad would grab the morning paper and he’d read the headlines while I grabbed the sports section for the box scores. And that’s all I had to do before heading off to class. Fast forward to the present and there’s so much more to catch up on these days and I’ve jiggered up my morning routine now:

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

A recent post on Mashable caught my attention, a how-to guide on measuring online influence. It begins with a dictionary-type definition of influence followed by the requisite discussion of personal branding and what it means online. Where things get interesting is how the author dives into mathematical formulae of how to measure influence with the following equations:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Trust * Expertise)

Of course, since Expertise = (Knowledge * Trust), we can further refine the equation to:

Influence = (Personal Brand * Knowledge * Trust2)

I am all for quantifying results but how does one come to these conclusions and more importantly, how does one make these calculations? Whatever happened to integers and real values? I will agree that influence is made up of these components, but to stating it in these terms isn’t helpful nor is it actionable. Some units would be a start.

The next part of the article delves into measuring influence by looking at tings like traffic, connections, track record and so forth. All interesting and valuable metrics. But where the article falls short is defining how these are related  and what to do with the metrics. They are data points without a story to wrap them up in a logical way. They’re sort of like ingredients without a recipe; they’re all important but without knowing what to do with them, they’re just ingredients. I admire the author for putting these ideas together but at the same time, let’s be careful not to position it as a how-to guide when the step-by-step part of it is missing.

I mentioned in an earlier post that quantifying things with rigor is the way to go and in this economy, clients are increasingly expecting this. If it were easy to do, it would have already been done. There are no clearcut accepted ways of doing this yet, so I’m all ears for looking at new methodologies and approaches. Some will work, others won’t. But shying away from facing reality isn’t going to cut the mustard these days. This is something we will be hearing more and more of, so I’ll be revisiting this topic in the future.

Talk about a hot-button topic!

Highly influential bloggers pride themselves on building a following by being truthful and objective, increasingly rare qualities in a world of “advertorials” and non-branded sites that blur the line between honest to goodness content and marketing collateral. It’s fascinating how it is so divisive. As the social world gains momentum, we’re going to see more and more of it so I’d suggest getting comfortable with the idea.

It’s fair to assume that consumers appreciate it when authoritative voices are up front and disclose potentially relevant conflicts of interest as it takes the moral high ground. When you hear financial analysts talk about companies they cover, they are required to disclose if they or their families have any stock positions in these companies. It’s not so cut and dried though, because the financial relationship is the exact opposite — analysts may own stock that they pay for themselves. But if we look at an example closer to the web world, does anyone remember search engines pre-advertising and pre-AdSense? The digerati were up in arms when Google first introduced AdSense but then we realized that it worked because they were trying to help us by delivering contextualized relevance.

Jeremiah Owyang’s recent piece on sponsored conversations has caused a bit of a stir. Essentially, it’s compensating bloggers to write about your company. He is bang-on about how they need to be done “ethically and is sustainable for the long run” and that the topic is pretty controversial. How can it work?

• If bloggers disclose they are being compensated
• If bloggers are free to speak their minds

These rules seem designed to protect the bloggers’ reputations which is fair. But I’d like to see something like a Hippocratic Oath for bloggers who engage in sponsored conversations so that companies can have some peace of mind too. Specifically, I’d include the following:

• Bloggers must speak truthfully about their experience and not have a hidden agenda
• Bloggers must disclose if they have any relationships with competitors
• Bloggers must disclose if they own stock in the company or competitors

That’s about it. If I were a lawyer, I’d add hundreds of other conditions, but my job is to enable conversation and engagement, not put up roadblocks. I think this is a just a start, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Since the outset, there has been furious debate as to whether Twitter can become a sustainable business. How could a company run for over 2 years without any revenue or a sustainable business model? It defied the business strategist side of me, especially when they they turned down a $500MM offer from Facebook. There was even a “Twitter business model contest” to see who could come up with one. Part of the challenge comes from the fact that Twitter has evolved from a single-purpose status bar into a very efficient and direct 1:1  or 1:many communication platform. Increasingly, it’s how I find things out before it hits the news (anyone remember Flight 1549 that crashed in the Hudson? It was reported by Twitterers on the scene within minutes and a full 15 minutes before any major news organization).In the nearly 3 years since its inception, the service has had its ups and downs — with serious downtime that comes with rapid expansion. Despite the growing pains, users put up with it because it was so addictively satisfying and to some, it represented the bleeding edge of social interaction.

Recently Twitter closed a $35MM series C round of funding which tells me there are indeed people who think there’s a viable revenue model in the works. As we saw with the CNN + Facebook status integration for Obama’s inauguration, there are opportunities for Twitter to do the same — or better — by integrating into other real-time events. Think about it: Twitter attracts super social people who want to share and what better way for brands to connect than via people who will spread the message because they want to? For them, it is less about the brand and more about the social interaction that they would normally do on their own. The question now is, how can Twitter monetize these activities without alienating its users (ahem, Facebook)?