Jack Dorsey

In our  previous posts, we spoke about Reid Hoffmann and Mark Zuckerberg.

This one’s dedicated to the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey (Jack on Twitter). Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator of Twitter. BusinessWeek called him one of technology’s “best and brightest.” MIT’s Technology Review named him in the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35.

For those who have still not started Tweeting, Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 charactersdisplayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partially inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob. This is what he had to say:

The working name was just “Status” for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.We wanted to capture that in the name—we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

The first prototype was an internal service for Odeo employees. By the end of 2007, about 500,000 tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2008, 100 million tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2009, 2 billion tweets per quarter were posted. In the first quarter of 2010, 4 billion tweets per quarter were posted.

Orkut Promote

Guess Orkut introduced “Promote” feature on user’s dashboard last month. And as I understood it, I smiled thinking its a nice way to make users more open to the concept of online advertising. Because, if you start promoting, and if you start paying attention to your friends’ promotions, then you might as well look-up other promotions (or advertisements). This FAQ  on google is a proof of the same

Why are there sometimes ads in my promotion box?

Orkut Promote is used by both advertisers and orkut users. You can trash or repromote ads in the same way you can do with your friends’ promotions.

So what’s Orkut Promote about? Well this is what the Orkut Blog has to say

 

Almost everyday there’s something that I’d like to spread to all of my orkut friends, whether that be a hilarious YouTube video, a new orkut community I just discovered or a quote that happens to fit my mood. That’s why I’m so happy to announce the release of a new orkut feature: ‘promote’.

orkut promote is a free tool that allows you to create announcements and automatically send them to all of your orkut friends with a single click. Promote makes it easy to show text, your original photos from your orkut photo albums and your original YouTube videos to your orkut friends– just give your promotion a catchy title and a short description and you’ll be all set to go.

With this new promote tool, you get:

• the ability to easily create promotions using text, photos from your orkut albums, and your original YouTube videos
• built-in ‘spread’ and ‘trash’ features that let you pass on the promotions you like to all of your friends and delete the ones you don’t so that they never show up for you again
• the ‘my promotions’ tool that shows you how many users have viewed, clicked on, or deleted your promotions, as well as how far they’ve spread
• the ability to stop or delete a promotion that you’ve created at any time

 

What does it means for marketeer’s?

Orkut is the largest social networking site in India and has very good presence in latin markets such as Brazil. The main difficulty faced by marketeer’s in exploiting Orkut channel till date was due the lack of viral and sharing features. This promotion tool can thus help to bring brand owners back on Orkut as users or even on communities.

This features also opens up great source of incoming traffic for publishers too as they were solely relying on tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. Publishers and marketeer’s targeting audiences in Emerging markets were desperately looking for such options as Orkut commands a majority share of social networking space in those countries.  This opening up of promotion channel will attract marketeer’s back to Orkut although the benefits are yet to be seen at initial stages.

 

Mark Zuckerberg

A couple of days back, I had put a post on the Founder of Linkedin, Reid Hoffman

Think people series should also feature the founder of Facebook, one of the most popular social netwo

rking site.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American billionaire and entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook with fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard. Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for Facebook. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Zuckerberg serves as Facebook’s CEO.

Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008.

Founding days

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. The idea for Facebook came from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which, like most colleges and prep schools, had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the “Facebook”. Once at college, Zuckerberg’s Facebook started off as just a “Harvard-thing”, until Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz.

By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools and hundreds of thousands of people were using it.

And that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s profile on Facebook. Read this and this for more.