"Talent Acquisition" - aka Employment Audition

Image via CrunchBase

Owen Thomas at VentureBeat has an interesting take on Twitter's acquisition of Fluther, which has been referred to as a "talent acquisition." We've seen a few of these recently, as Owen points out. Kudos to him for calling out Twitter on this: In no uncertain terms, this is simply Twitter hiring smart people. Nothing wrong with that at all. His point is, companies acquire assets or they hire people; no such thing as a "talent acquisition" in M&A practice.

I wouldn't proclaim Fluther a failed start-up. I had never heard of Fluther before yesterday. And I'm sure most people had not. And I don't expect to see it's use explode. It will, supposedly, live on as a standalone service. Is it a failure? I guess that depends on how you view it.

As an "employment audition" it is highly successful, having captured the attention of Twitter and secured these guys great jobs. That's a big success in my mind.

Related articles that I hand-selected with Zemanta's help:

• Fluther Flocks to Twitter (twitter.com)
• Twitter Acquires Talent Behind Slick Q&A Site (mashable.com)
• How Twitter acquires people (venturebeat.com)

About.me and the "Spawning of Features"

Image via WikipediaAol announced yesterday that they acquired the recently launched service called About.me. There's been some discussion about why a brand new service was sold four days after they launched, and what unique proposition they offered. If you haven't heard, About.me is a simple-to-setup "calling card" webpage. Here's mine: Jim's About.me page.

There are two things that captured my imagination about this service. The first is, why them? There are many other sites that have been doing this for a long time. Flavors.me comes to mind, but so do services from the "big boys". Check out Google Profiles and Yahoo Pulse - they're giving these services serious attention in an effort to capture the "identity space" that Facebook and LinkedIn have done such a good job with.

I suppose Aol wanted to provide a simple to use service (I have to admit, the user experience on About.me is clean and simple - a big plus), at an easy to remember domain...in an effort to stay competitive with Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, among others. If Facebook has proven anything, it's that "identity" on the web is important to growth.

The other thing that captured my attention about this service - more so than all the other discussed and debated points - is the "spawning of features" effect. What do I mean by that? If you view Facebook as a collection of features, services, and applications, it can be overwhelming. Certainly it's not a user experience to be admired (aside: this point validated by the recent appointment at Facebook of Paul Adams, previously Google Researcher that critiqued Facebook's user experience). So, I see a trend where companies are launched based solely on one simple feature that was previously part of Facebook.

A service like About.me is just a simplified, standalone version, of your Facebook profile, with a dash of design elegance and a dose clean UI/UX. It doesn't stop there. Don't forget Twitter. It is, in it's genesis, a standalone version of Facebook's status update. Ditto for Path, the latest buzzed about photo sharing service. What else?

It's interesting to speculate what might come next. But it's equally perplexing when you consider that many critiques of new start-ups brush them aside as mere features, not companies.

Related articles I hand selected with the help of Zemanta:

• What AOL Got When it Bought About.me (readwriteweb.com)
• AOL Acquires About.me Four Days After Official Launch (mashable.com)
• Booyah! (tonyconrad.wordpress.com)
• Is this a Feature or a Company? (thenextweb.com)

How I Use Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

I follow interesting people and not so interesting people (some of my friends :-p ) on Twitter.  I won't get into a whole explanation of what Twitter is over here. If you don't know, get a quick education on their site and at oh, about a million other places on the web.

People use a lot of different third-party applications, on their desktops and on their handheld devices to participate in Twitter.  I've tried a bunch, and this isn't intended to be a review of any of them, but more so a peek into how I use Twitter.

Shocking as it may be to some of my geeky friends, I actually use SMS on my BlackBerry to follow the most interesting Twitter conversationalists and friends. It's just a handful of people and brands that I follow in this manner. However SMS is probably by far the most common way that I post tweets to Twitter.

I have TwitterBerry and TweetCaster on my BlackBerry, and use them mostly to pick up @messages. Still not sure which one I like better. The later is more feature rich, but the former is more responsive as an app.

I've stayed away from the third-party apps on the desktop because I know they would immediately consume more of my time than I'd like. So I check in once in a while, taking a sip from the hose, on the Twitter website itself.

Now, that's mostly the mechanics of how I use Twitter. I actually use it to hear about interesting news from the people that I follow and click-through to the interesting things they've written and discovered on the web.

I use it to discover interesting articles linked to by the people I follow.  And as a way to easily communicate with friends and colleagues.

To me, the most powerful aspect of Twitter is the professional implications - and maybe that's why their recent valuation was at $1B - money in them thar hills.  I use it to find professionals that I need to reach for my job. LinkedIn is a powerful tool for finding WHO the people are at a particular company, but you can't easily communicate with them on LinkedIn (unless you pony up the cash for their premium account). On Twitter, you can communicate with them - albeit in public - but it's just a conversation opener.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media Is Changing The Rules For CRM (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Social Media and The Reality of Control (altitudebranding.com)