Ike Pigott

"So, the NCAA ban on hashtags is justified because it would be an ad for Twitter? Facebook is implementing hashtags as well. Ergo, the use would be for social networks in general, and too ambiguous to be considered an advertisement." - Ike Pigott

"The last line of this piece is comedy gold. Well played!" - Ike Pigott

""All puffed up with vanity, we see what we want to see. To the beautiful and the wise the mirror always lies." We really do tend to observe that which we are conditioned to see, and your stranger was likely viewing you through the prism of his own experience (and possible failures.) If it makes you feel any better, his "advice" to you was more of a self-admonishment than a directive to you. Society is being dragged into an interconnected world faster than it can uniformly absorb that change. Some, closer to the center of gravity, are drawn faster, while those at the fringes have yet to feel the tug and wonder why others are flying away from them. ("You" are flying away from "them," because the fixed frame of reference is always the individual experience.) Would that the rest of us caught up with the relative dance of the planets. It would make the retrograde more comprehensible. ;)" - Ike Pigott

"Now, when are you going to get some decent MALE speakers?" - Ike Pigott

"Linda, I disagree with the end of your comment. The percentage of users who are engaged in Chats is very, very small. Twitter doesn't care about that number of people, nor what they represent. "Power users" mean nothing to Twitter. Twitter is more interested in creating the infrastructure to allow "broadcasters" to blast to a big audience. The rest is window dressing at this point -- valuable and important window dressing that is too big to ignore, but still just a sash." - Ike Pigott

"1) Cost? 2) How will your technology get around the API restriction that is capping TweetChat?" - Ike Pigott

"It would appear that Twitter has discovered the "sweet spot" for a startup. 1) Run on VC for as long as possible 2) Extend that growth with an API and strong developer support 3) Postpone monetization as long as possible 4) Reach critical mass 5) Slowly squeeze the developer community, absorbing uses that make money 6) Own the empire Twitter is in stage 5 right now, but I am not certain they are looking at things like Communities as a moneymaker. If Twitter did have that in mind, the competing product would have been launched instead of something like Vine or Medium. So this smacks of Collateral Damage, an unintended consequence of girding up a vulnerability to a competitor. It also seems like the same sort of short-sighted thinking that lead to Google shutting down Reader. "Why should we care about the use-case of a small subset of nerds." Yes. If you are a regular part of a TweetChat, you are a Nerd, and you are in a minority. Twitter is now for mass-marketing, for live-tweeting TV..." - Ike Pigott

"John, I think Microsoft was intentional in using the caterers. The bulk of the Lumia market is headed downrange, toward first-time smart-phone buyers who are upgrading from Feature Phones. That's where the OS is going to get a toehold, in the US and especially overseas (where subsidized plans are non-existent, and the Nokias are faring well). Grab the first-time smartphone buyers who are caterers today, and you get tomorrow's owners of catering companies." - Ike Pigott

"Just last week, I saw a content scraper defending himself, with the comment: "If you don't want people to republish your posts, then limit the sharing on your RSS feed to just excerpts." I wonder if these are the same people who believe that if a woman goes outside without head-to-toe covering, and gets sexually assaulted - well, that's just what happens and she should have been more modest." - Ike Pigott

"There are any number of ways you could use "API call proximity" to be a better proxy for Visibility. I don't think Twitter can tell what was actually on your screen, but maybe you could use a sliding scale: Accounts following 10K or more: within a minute Accounts following 1K or more: within three minutes Accounts following less than 1K: within ten minutes." - Ike Pigott

"Yes, I've seen the rate card. It's not for the timid. But I do have a bit of an understanding of just how resource intensive it would be to deliver that data. Facebook does provide it in Groups, where there is a "Seen By," but in Twitter's case we are talking orders of magnitude above that, and the fact that retweets can expose the message outside the original "universe" of possible receivers. Thanks for the comment, and let's hope Twitter sees it as an Add-On instead of the most primary revenue stream." - Ike Pigott

"Fortunately, by the time she is old enough to find out about this, there will be more information. As to the larger question, I offer this. God made the world. He gave it to Mankind. We screwed up, and we broke it. So it's not a perfect place anymore. There are good people and there are bad people -- and sometimes, the really Bad people make Bad things happen. It doesn't mean the world is bad, and it doesn't mean that there is no Love. ----------- When she's older, she will be in the same position you are now. It's the circle of life." - Ike Pigott

"John, the reason you are getting less engagement is that your Followers have "matured," and now are following more people on their own, by orders of magnitude. Those users are simply less likely to see *your* tweets, because they are buried in a wider stream." - Ike Pigott

"Never, ever assume that the people on TV are pronouncing things correctly." - Ike Pigott

"What about a QR reader baked into Google Glass...?" - Ike Pigott

"I'm guessing that means they are pulling additional metrics that are not related directly to your permit-driven accounts. Google News mentions might be one, for example, that you don't log into and can't easily game, but could be publicly available. Another might be homesite page rank, which would benefit a scientist or public official who has Clout but doesn't piddle in Social. For that matter, they could score the length or number of edits on a subject's Wikipedia page, under the notion that those measures might correlate to people being well-known and actively influential. Part of me doesn't want to know what the Secret Sauce is." - Ike Pigott

"Frank, I don't think it was Privacy. It may come down to Copyright. Google Reader offered for free what Meltwater charges clients for. Not as exhaustive, but a lot of the same potential litigants. I'm wondering if Google saw the AP/Meltwater verdict coming, and decided to get its deep pockets out of the line of fire, considering it is a non-revenue product." - Ike Pigott

"Many people know that Rush exists, but have very skewed ideas about what that means. When I was a teenager in the 80s, there were a lot of people who thought they were Satanic." - Ike Pigott

"I'll answer that, Margie. Rush is a band of three Canadian guys who figured out a long time ago that they'd rather do the music they liked, and which challenged them, rather than try to cater to a Music Marketing template. They almost lost their jobs, but a legion of loyal fans bailed them out. Because they were outside the "approved system," they were marginalized as a fringe act by critics who were more concerned with clever quips than with musical integrity. Eventually, RUSH won out, when the music industrial complex exploded, and technology enabled fans to find what they liked whenever they liked, without the benefit of Kingmakers. They are an acquired musical taste, but once you get a feel for what they do and how they do it, you can mine their music for years and still discover little nuggets of nuance that elevate your sense of what art can be. TOO LONG DIDN'T READ VERSION: They are diamonds in the waste." - Ike Pigott

"Taylor Hawkins on tambourine." - Ike Pigott

"Oh, I disagree. Rush has an amazing catalog of beats that could (and should) be cross-pollinated into rap. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already. Music is music, and great music is great across genre." - Ike Pigott

"Marc, I'd be willing to wager that the number of actual users would come in under 325." - Ike Pigott

"Avery, you asked: Aren't these 'collections' a bit similar to facebook's new graph search? I don't believe so. The Facebook Graph Search seems to build its trade on what people are posting and including about themselves on their profile. Only a tiny percentage of the intentionally-placed information on collective profiles are done with any intentional Search in mind. The Medium Collections are curated by hand, and the titles of them aren't exactly SEO quality descriptions. That's quite alright, because from a design standpoint Medium seems to be built around reading and writing. I don't know there is even a Search button on the site - but you are welcome to browse the Collections. Medium is about serendipitous discovery. (Cue the part where Chris tells me I missed something...)" - Ike Pigott

"Chris, this is timely. I just got in yesterday, and browsed the collections. Not finding the one that spoke to me, I started one for brief lessons and crisp personal storytelling. It's called View Askew (the lessons we learn while looking the other direction.) It isn't an open collection right now, I wanted to play with it as a curation of people to give it a voice before opening it up. You have anything to fit? Let me know." - Ike Pigott

"There is very little that is new. Insulting snark? Done that: http://ike4.me/o210 Negative social media reviews? Yep: http://ike4.me/o211" - Ike Pigott

"I was in London last year, and caught both sides of the lesson. My phone, with AT&T's International Roaming turned on, was supposed to carry me across the island at better rates. While I was on business, I didn't want my wife disconnected. We brought her off-contract HTC Aria, bought a local SIM, and she had more than enough minutes to talk and such to feel secure. Knowing what I know after that trip, it's cheap phones and cheap overseas SIMs all the way." - Ike Pigott