Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Internet Entrepreneur

Archive for June, 2007

Wired: “Dandies on their way to a garden party…”

Wired:

This morning I woke up and the first thing I read was a message from Scott Rafer with subject “you made wired!!!”

I once told Scott that my biggest wish would be to make it to the cover of Wired magazine. It would mean that I would have done something so special that it would be special enough for Wired.

So you can imagine that I jumped out of bed and ran to my computer to see what was up.

There is a large article in this months issue of Wired Magazine about Michael Arrington. The title is “TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz … and Cash“.

This is the first paragraph:

“Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to “get the fuck out.” But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals.”

Yes, that were Patrick, Arjen and me! Only we didn’t come there to pitch our start-up but just to have coffee and talk about The Next Web Conference where Michael would be a speaker. But still!

Right now I’m editing the video that Patrick made during our visit to Arrington. We will publish it later today on the Fleck.com blog. It is online now

UPDATE: the Wired cover image is NOT real! I received a few mails from people who thought it was. You can generate your own cover too. Sorry for the confusion…

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TwitterMail.com - Alive and Kicking

TwitterMail.comTomorrow TwitterMail.com will be officially launched. I, and a bunch of other people, have been testing it all weekend and I’m confident it will work just great.

The official launch won’t be that spectacular but we do plan to contact some blogs and news-sites and try to get a small buzz going.

I will use this post to collect links to articles written about TwitterMail. If I forget any please let me know.

The first one:
Bright.nl: TwitterMail maakt mobiel twitteren nog makkelijker

The first second one:
Naweb2.com: twittermail - twitter desde do teu e-mail

Gonzague: Twittermail.com : twittez par email

NuJij.nl: TwitterMail maakt mobiel twitteren nog makkelijker

Noticiastech: TwitterMail se lanza oficialmente mañana

Planet.nl: Nederlandse vinding: TwitterMail

Neville Hobson: More cool ways to use Twitter

wwwhat’s new: TwitterMail - Escribir en Twitter mandando email

Mashable: TwitterMail Lets You Tweet from your Email Account

Showeb20.com: TwitterMail—将你的Twitter变成简易的Web邮箱

100shiki.com: Twitterの投稿用メールアドレスを発行してくれる

KillerStartUps.com: TwitterMail.com - Send Tweets to Your Inbox

Yamaq blog: twitterMailを使ってみた

Netafull: メールでTwitterを更新/確認できる

Del.icio.us: Popular pages tagged with “tools” on del.icio.us

LADY BANANA: Just About To Go To Bed When,

Web Tips Blog: Twitter Tools

Digg.com: Twittermail.com - Recieve and Send tweets by e-mail

Online.com.es: TwitterMail, twitter por mail

BlogoWogo: TwitterMail Lets You Tweet from your Email Account

wangtam.com: TwitterMail: Twitter 的第三方电子邮件工具

Downloadsquad.com: Twitting by email with TwitterMail

Aliza Sherman rants and raves: TwitterMail.com

Benedikt Rieke-Benninghaus: TwitterMail

1000 Times 1000: Twittermail works like a charm

mattherzberger.com: In case you needed another way to post to Twitter

japan.internet.com: Twitter の投稿用メールアドレスを発行してくれる

BigQueue: TwitterMail….for those of you who work at companies with very difficult IT departments

Infoshoek.com: TwitterMail, twitter por mail

Carrero: TwitterMail te lo pone más fácil

IncubaWeb: Twitteando desde tu email con TwitterMail

Pimp Your Work: TwitterMail is the piece to make Twitter work business

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Social Networking Etiquette

Happy PeopleI have 470 contacts at LinkedIn, 50 friends at Hyves and 114 Friends and 185 Followers in Twitter and 1096 contacts in my AddressBook.

What I need is a set of rules to manage my Social Networking contacts.

Unfortunately most people don’t take the effort to introduce themselves in their requests to get connected. This led me to blindly accept any request I get from any of the networks. It is just too much effort to find out who these people are who invite me. even if I check their profile at LinkedIn I’m still clueless most of the time.

A while ago I met with Reid Hoffman in Paris. He is the CEO of LinkedIn and we spent 30 minutes or so discussing Fleck.com and LinkedIn. I enjoyed the conversation and we exchanged businesscards. Without hesitating I invited him to my network on Linkedin. This was his reply:

I only connect with people that I know well enough to refer to other people that I know.

That was impressive! So his rule is a simple one; if he knows you well enough to refer you he will connect. If he doesn’t know you well enough he won’t connect. Simple, but not too friendly either.

On the other hand, I would like to keep my LinkedIn profile clean and tidy and just accepting all invitations clearly isn’t a good strategy.

I read a complaint on Twitter from someone who tried to connect with someone he had been emailing and Twittering with for months. The person refused to connect because they had never met offline. That was his rule. Being an Internet Entrepreneur I can’t use that one either.

So what rules should I use?
What rules do you use?
Do we need rules or Etiquette?
Who deserves to be in my LinkedIn profile and who should I delete?
Does it matter if you allow people you don’t even know to connect with you?

My temporary strategy will be to only accept people who are real friends, partners and people I have worked or communicated with before.

I am going to refuse other people but ask them why they would like to connect with me so I might be able to add more reasons to connect.

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Coffee with Onno Bakker from eBuddy

Coffee with Onno Bakker from eBuddy

Almost every morning you can find me at the terrace outside of a small coffeebar called Nero at the Vijzelgracht in Amsterdam.

The Vijzelgracht is an important street and a lot of people use it to get to work. I waved at a few start-up founders (visitopia.com, eBuddy, draftworldwide) and other friends. This morning Onno Bakker from eBuddy ended up joining me for coffee.

He told me this funny story about how his mother uses Hyves.nl now but once had trouble with email. She had sent him two messages. The first one ended with “I’m going to tell you the rest in another message because this screen is full”. She continued her story in her second message.

And now she uses social networking. Isn’t that cool?

I’m installing WordPress for my mother. She wants to start blogging and is tired of her static website because she can’t easily update it herself.

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TwitterMail.com in 9, 8, 7…

TwitterMail.comA few months ago I posted an OpenIdea here titled “OpenIdea: twittermail.com” in which I proposed that someone would build a simple ‘email to Twitter.com engine’. It took a while but 3 days ago Lennaert and Bram contacted me with a plan to actually build Twittermail.

They started on Sunday and I expect them to finish the whole thing before the end of the week. In fact, it already works but they are adding some extra features and polishing the site.

I have been using the service for a few hours now and so far it works very well. Hardly any delay in posting and very easy to set-up. They also contacted the Twitter people who promised to add a small “Posted via Twittermail” message to each Twitter that comes from Twittermail.com. I expect the whole thing to become very popular!

It would be nice to get some people to beta test the service before we go live. If you are interested email me or leave a comment here.

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Weblogistan.com: Sold to…

Buy!…you?

I always liked that domainname! Weblogistan.com just sounds cool.

Right now we are using it for the LinkCloud Widget and the ClickMyBut widget.

Both have been growing steady and some Buts get a lot of clicks! But it isn’t something we spend a lot of time on or have any plans for.

So if you are interested in buying the domain, developing it together with us OR have a great idea for a service to add to it let, me know in the comments here.

Or just go and get yourself a ClickMyBut or LinkCloud

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