Loïc Le Meur blog

0 Rule #1: be honest

Awesome move by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch to post as soon as possible about a 17 years old intern asking for computers against posts on TechCrunch. 

With social software and everyone a clic away there is no way something like that would have remained secret, there aren't many secrets left, look at what happened to Tiger Woods, with no further comparison. And it's good news that it is becoming impossible to cheat and hide being dishonest. Same with businesses and products, there is no way you can hide a problem under the carpet hoping it will not go out. Kudos to TechCrunch for being upfront about it before someone reveals it and jeopardizes the entire credibility of the team and damages the brand.

We're in a world where companies like Zappos thrive because they are transparent and honest, answering 24h/24 their customers in public on Twitter and even advising them to call competition if they do not have what you want. 

The relationship and trust you create with everyone around you in the long run is more important than anything. I would rather keep your trust for life than sell you crappy service or product even at high profit. Our email supplier got hacked two months ago and some of our users got spam, they could naturally think that we had sold their emails and it would have been out anyway, so we posted about it. We kept the trust, what happened to us can happen to anyone.

Let's not begin an internet lynching of a kid. It would really not be appropriate, but if the facts are true, that lesson is a good one to publicize so that others don't make the same mistake. After all, he is only 17 and has time to learn that this was a really bad idea, as well as time to recover from it. I think he just wanted to go way too fast. Let's forgive him. 

Now go write an apology post in which you recognize everything that needs to. Like right now. It should already be up.

Vive la transparence. 

update, John Furrier says this is entirely wrong and that he talked to him who never did that. I hope he will post his side of the story soon.

update, The Line Was Crossed. 

0 Facebook pages loaded with new posting stats

Since I have been sending all my updates except @replies to my Facebook page with ping.fm and Seesmic, I have been impressed by the feedback: 6,700 or so "fans" and literally hundreds of likes and comments daily. Facebook now gives you impressions and % feedback stats per post. 

Facebook now displays how many times an update or a picture has been displayed, for example 6195 people have seen in 24 hours the tweet from Bill Gates I posted. 

Facebook now also gives you a % feedback like in this example out of the 6,262 impressions of my lunch yesterday (!) 0.89% of facebook users who saw it interacted with it with a comment or a like. 

Very cool, but it seems Facebook is testing it for now since it goes on and off (you don't see the stats anymore sometimes) and it's not on all the pages yet, I don't see them on Seesmic's Facebook page.

My following is still much bigger on Twitter but I can see my community growing on Facebook daily and most importantly the interactions I am getting there higher and higher, if you don't have or don't update a Facebook page yet, you might consider it. 

It really works like Twitter since friends can "follow you" but you don't have to friend every single person, which I could not do anyway since your standard Facebook profile is limited to 5,000.

Sending a picture to all your social networks is really easy with ping.fm, just take the pic with your phone and email it to your ping.fm email address, it gets posted directly on your Facebook page, Flickr and the link to Twitter and all other social software you want. 

0 Davos Social Software Powerhouse panel video

First time all social software leaders from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Ning were in one room at the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss how social software is changing society. I was really honored to moderate the social software panel and Seesmic Look displayed live reactions on Twitter.

0 Join us in New York or live in video this thursday 9am eastern time

Hello friends,

This Thursday January 21st at 9am to 12 noon eastern time in New York and everywhere live in video we're launching a new product designed to help Twitter go mainstream, a new TV like experience that can be used by anyone.

Using Seesmic Look is very close to watching TV with a very rich and unique experience.
We also have many partners, media and brands associated to Look and would like to share our plans with you and get your feedback, as always.
We are organizing it as a mini-conference style with awesome speakers. Already confirmed is Steve Rubel @steverubel

Join us in person in New York from 9am to 12noon at:

The Times Center 242 West 41st Street New York, NY 10018

or join us on live stream on the web seesmic.com

Please rsvp on Facebook as seating is limited, we are working on it as we speak and will keep you posted!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=259486809940

Thank you and we hope to see you there or online!

0 Seesmic acquired ping.fm. Here is why ping.fm is so cool

Scoble was right, we acquired ping.fm. Zee from the Next Web, Erick Schonfeld and Robin Wauters of TechCrunch had guessed right as well by seeing me posting that much via ping.fm or hanging out with the ping.fm founders at LeWeb. I could not confirm when they asked me since it was not closed, I just said, which was right, that it was not accurate.

Your friends are not all in one social network, not even on Facebook, they generally heavily use one and the others much less. I have friends who live in Twitter, others who mostly use Facebook and some who only spend time really in LinkedIn because it's more professional. I don't have many music crazy friends but I understand that many use MySpace because its roots are to connect music artist fans. Some of my friends only enjoy connecting in private with small groups and they use Yammer, Ning or Identi.ca and status.net for that purpose. 

Social software usage patterns are much more diverse than we think. Do you really want to stay in touch with all your friends? Then you have to update all social networks, even the ones you don't use yourself much. 

Here are all the social networks I chose to update from ping.fm:

I am getting surprising feedback from networks I would not expect any of my friends using or also by always updating my Twitter, Facebook Profile, Facebook pages and Ning sites. 

Ping.fm makes it extremely easy, so easy it is dangerous in fact, but so cool once you have been careful.

Chat is so cool

 I always have gmail open web based and gtalk chat is always on on my gmail. Skype is generally online too as I use both for my work daily to stay in touch with my team. Ping.fm has as a genius feature, you can add the ping.fm chat bot as a contact in gtalk, aim and skype. Ping.fm becomes available as a chat contact and you just can directly type an update as a chat message for ping.fm to update 50 social networks! Very very easy and always on, just be careful it is so easy you could write in the wrong chat window. It is very useful on a netbook too, where resources are limited you probably won't run a very complex app but you will likely have mail and chat on. Just paste that link you find interesting, ping.fm will shorten it for you seamlessly.

Send images by email to both Facebook images, Twitter and Flickr

Same principle for images, I love sending my images to Flickr since it's the photo service I have been using for years and pretty much every pic I post in public is there. But that is not enough, you need to post that pic to Facebook, your Facebook page and also Twitter as a link. Ping.fm does it all for you. Just send that pic via email.

Smart duplicates management

Of course you need to be careful about not posting twice in some networks and the ping.fm api is very smart for that. We have added it to Twhirl for more than a year and while it updates all your social networks it won't post twice to them of course if you use a Twitter app that implemented it correctly. Ping.fm will be available in all Seesmic applications very soon.

Now the feedback

As my friend Chris Pirillo, who uses ping.fm daily, told me once, ping.fm helps you update all those places but someone needs to build the other way round, bring you all the feedback in one place. The Seesmic applications start to deliver that and we will definitely bring you back all the feedback so that you can not only update but also interact with all your friends everywhere.

While we love the leading social networks, we believe in diversity, it's like languages: english and spanish are the most widespread but that does not make danish or polish irrelevant or disappear. I think we will have many social networks do interact with daily, and it is only a beginning. 

Seesmic's mission is to make it easy for you to update them all and read all the feedback you are getting. All in one place on any device.

ping.fm co-founders Sean McCullough, Adam Duffy and myself at SXSW09

I am thrilled ping.fm co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough joined forces with the Seesmic team to make that vision a reality as well as ping.fm investors Joi Ito (@joi), Reid Hoffman (@quixotic) who was already a Seesmic shareholder and Mohamed Nanabhay (@mohamed).

0 Seesmic Android got 30,000 downloads and gets featured on Android Market

Seesmic Android got 30,000 downloads with a 58% install rate in just a few weeks and now we are thrilled our friends at Google decided to feature it just ahead of the holidays season. See for yourselves how it looks like

  

Seesmic for Android's raccoon is proudly featured next to Facebook and Myspace on the general Android Market welcome screen and gets a dedicated slot on the social category! Thanks Google, we are glad that you like Seesmic Android.

This is just a beginning, we have a dedicated team on Android and coming very soon are multi-accounts and Twitter location support, as well as yes, surprises. Expect a year of very fast updates to our already popular Android app!

The first reviews Seesmic for Android got are amazing too, thank you everyone who posted about it, there are so many we can't link them all but here are a few:

Seesmic's new release: Android NEARLY has a perfect Twitter app

Mashable: Seesmic for Android Adds Twitter Search, Lists and Trending Topics

Appboy: Seesmic finally makes Twitter usable on Android

EuroDroid: The best Android Twitter apps #10: Seesmic

Mobile Content Today: Seesmic 1.1 for Android Twitter Client Looks like a keeper so far

Seesmic launches key upgrades to mobile Android version

Will Seesmic for Android be the Tweetie of the Android Market?

R3Troid: Seesmic: The best Twitter app for Android?

TechCrunch: Seesmic Ventures Into Mobile With Powerful New Apps For Android and Blackberry

thanks everyone for your reviews and tweets!

0 A Google Twitter client transforming bit.ly into goo.gl urls?

I posted this and it got retweeted with the bit.ly link I used changed into a goo.gl url what is that interesting Twitter client changing short links? Not really changing them actually since it is a short link to my tweet.

Might be a tweet from Google reader or something.

0 Forget about checking in on Foursquare or Gowalla just stream your location on my tracks all the time

Don’t get me wrong, I love Foursquare and Gowalla, but why bother checking in at all?

My Tracks is a very cool Android application created by Dylan Casey and his team at Google that uses your phone GPS and records your location live.

I used it today as I was skiing in Jackson Hole and was surprised my Droid GPS even worked fine behind my jacket’s pocket. My tracks stores your location and saves it as a Google Map which you can then share on Twitter using the Android share feature (that works fine with Seesmic for Android).

My Tracks also records a file with lots of interesting information that you can also see live on your phone screen such as elevation, min, average and max speed.

It is very precise I think I am going to start using it for my runs as well.

Now think about what we will be able to do with location when an app like that will stream my position live if I want to (like Google latitude does for example but limited to who you are connected to there).

Foursquare and Gowalla ask us to check in in places when we are in a movie theatre or a restaurant, why would we have to check-in at all frankly? Why not just check in automatically if I accepted that the app does this for me.

It could then just prompt me if I want to rate a shopping experience or a restaurant or if a friend is nearby or left a comment on that place.

Very exciting applications ahead.

0 Video: day two, how we are getting LeWeb ready

Day 2: a new backstage video of how we get ready the LeWeb venue for the 2200 participants from 46 countries

0 Video: preparing the LeWeb 2009 venue

Here is a quick video of the huge LeWeb room getting setup and ready for the 2,200 participants from 46 countries this year.