We are guests at the pilot show for Bright TV.
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Twitter.com is down again but people are starting to figure out that TwitterMail saves your messages and submits them to Twitter.com as soon as it is up again. This is a feature of TwitterMail that we didn’t advertise a lot but it turns out to be pretty cool and useful in situations like this.
Only downside for us is that it isn’t possible to create a new account at TwitterMail when Twitter.com is down because we can’t check your account details then. We should think of a way to work around that because it looks like TwitterMail isn’t working well when in fact it is just Twitter.com that is down.
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Saurier Duval is the owner and founder of The Museum of Modern Betas. he has been collecting webservices that are in Beta for years now. He has covered Fleck.com and all other services we launched in beta over the years.
Today I received a message from him that he added TwitterMail to The Museum of Modern Betas. He also wrote the following:
“You are a neverending spring of brilliant ideas”
A great compliment coming from a man who spends his days looking at all the brilliant new services that are being launched! Check out the page he made about TwitterMail here: MoMB: TwitterMail
Patrick and I spent a few months in 2006 visiting every Mobile Operator in the Netherlands to see if we could convince them to start selling us Location Based Services. We told them that we wanted to be their first customers and that we would love to resell their services for them.
The reasoning was that they wouldn’t be able to sell it themselves because clients wouldn’t be interested unless every operator would offer those services. So we wanted to be the party in the middle who would buy Location Based Services from every operator in the Netherlands and resell those services to companies who needed them. Very similar to SMS wholesale companies.
The main problem we faced was that every operator wanted to make money on Location Based Services right from the start. In fact, they told us that implementing Location Based Services would cost them 1 million and they were happy to start building it for us as long as we would guarantee 1 million in profit (not revenue) within a year.
Since we were talking with 5 operators at the time this meant we would have to guarantee up to 5 million in profit in total. That turned out to be too much of a gamble even for us.
Last week I spoke to someone at a party who told me about how he introduced Voicemail in the Netherlands. It is hard to imagine today but there was a time when we didn’t have voicemail. The operator told him to build and introduce these services within 12 months. Their plan was to offer Voicemail for €2 or €3 a month.
He told them that it would be possible to build the technical back-end but impossible to tie it into accounting within 12 months. The only way to introduce this service within 12 months was to build it and give it away free.
Management was appalled at the thought of giving such a valuable service away for free! They figured they could charge a huge percentage of their millions of users a few euros per month which would mean millions in extra revenue.
But then he made them a simple calculation: if everybody would have voicemail for free then nobody would ever get a busy tone. They would spent longer on the phone leaving a message resulting in a lot more phone calls. Then people receiving the voicemail would have to listen to their voicemail over the phone (more calls) and call back (more calls). And giving it away for free would save a lot of development costs too!
They did a simple calculation and found out that they would make a lot more money if they gave away voicemail for free so they did just that.
The moral of this story is that not every service or project makes a profit right from the start or in the way that you would expect it at first. Giving stuff away for free could actually make you more money than charging for it.
Other obvious examples are Free salty snacks to encourage beer consumption, Free windshield cleaning tools at the gas station and Free newspapers.
Maybe some day the Mobile Operators will come to the same conclusion and implement Location Based Services after all.
After a bumpy ride we can finally declare TwitterMail live. Moving the domain from one server to the other 48 hours before launch wasn’t too smart. Oh well…
But it all seems to work fine now! Give it a try if you want and please give me feedback here. So far more than 100 people are using it and we hope this will grow rapidly from now on. And why shouldn’t it?
A few tips:
- Receive notifications of replies: If someone adds your username to their post we will send you that message via email.
- Longer URLs are changed into TinyURLs on the fly.
- Longer Twitter messages are saved on TwitterMail and referenced in your Twitterpost with a “More” link. That means that the 140 characters limit isn’t there anymore.
- Schedule your posts: Add a time to your subject-line when you want you post to be published. Example: “21:00″ will publish your post at 21:00 (9 PM) GMT+1
- Receive the last 20 posts from your friends in one email: Send a message with ‘friends’ in the subject and within a few minutes you will receive the last 20 tweets from all of your friends!
Have fun with TwitterMail.com or check this post for a list of blogs and news-sites that wrote about TwitterMail.
Privacy is overrated.
I have been saying that for a while now.
But there are some things that deserve to be private. My mail in general is not secret. If you want to read it you can come over and I will give you an hour behind my computer. Read whatever you want.
But I do want to keep my passwords to myself. If you don’t mind.
And because I work at public hotspots a lot I know that anyone (with some knowledge of Wi-Fi) could catch all my usernames and password out of thin air.
What I need is a VPN connection.
I think.
I actually don’t know what a VPN connection is or how it works. But that hasn’t stopped me from recommending other people to get one.
‘Worried about your data?
Just get a VPN!’
So maybe I should get one myself?
Who can help me install one?
What software do I need?
Do I need a hosting company to provide me with a VPN server?
Is there a public VPN server somewhere that I can use?
Do I need VPN Tracker?
How the hell does this work?
