Here's to the crazy ones

Thank You Steve .......

 

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Here Comes United Plankton!

I'm really excited to tell you about a new product we're builing that's going to change the way you share and communicate across Social Media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. As some of you may know, I'm the guy behind @SocialMedia411 and a couple other accounts on Twitter. For the last 5 years I've been a keen observer of Social Media, and over that time I've been waiting for Twitter and Facebook to give us tools that provide more granular control over who we share things with, along with the ability to share privately or semi-privately. It's become clear to us that the solution we're looking for is not going to be built by the existing platforms, so we've decided to build it ourselves!

Our first step is the formation of a group called United Plankton. United Plankton's mission is to build exceptional consumer-centric Internet products that give control back to the people and free users from some of the constraints that Social Networks impose on their members. And to be clear, we're not building another Social Network; We're building tools to help you communicate more effectively across existing Networks.

Leadership is the opposite of Charisma

Ed Kohler forwarded Katarina Fake's latest blog post to me earlier today. As part of a larger theme, she quotes John Holt:

"Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them.

Leadership qualities are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about." ~ John Holt

In her piece Katarina talks about her conversations with Anil Dash on the subject, about how it’s hard to communicate the motivation to "build cool stuff, good tools for other people to use" to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Take a few minutes and read it, it's worth your time.

I see so many entrepreneurs in the Valley today building things that are simply variations of the "flavor of the day" darlings. It's incremental innovation if it's innovation at all.

It's time to get inspired. It's time to be inspiring. The world doesn't really need more photo-sharing or group-texting apps. As Katarina concludes in her post, "Let's get excited and make things." Even better, let's get excited and make some NEW things.

So you want to do a startup, eh?

From Tara Hunt's excellent presentation embedded below:

Startups are heartbreaking, soul-crushing affairs. So why are we doing this? Because I can't imagine doing anything else. It's an unhealthy but beautifully necessary obsession. Because without us crazy delusional people the world would be a boring stagnant place.

 

Twitter vs. Facebook: A Breakdown of 2010 Social Demographics

DigitalSurgeons.com makes interesting use of the Polar Area Chart to break down the demographic data of U.S. Twitter and Facebook users:

"One has over 500 million users, the other just over 100 million. But who are they and what’s their behavior? What’s their value to a brand? How old are they? What’s their education? How much do they make? Just exactly what does the Facebook vs. Twitter landscape look like? Good questions. Here’s how we see it."