Month: June 2008

It’s no secret that I’ve been a Twitter user and a big fan of the service for some time now.

In April of last year, I wrote a post (on my old blog) about getting into the feel of Twitter, the potential for 3rd parties app and enjoying all of my 19 friends that were in my immediate Twitter network.

Then about a month after that, I wrote this post about being addicted to Twitter. That post is interesting to me. I linked to a great post by Dave Winer and I also urged my friend Howard Lindzon to start using Twitter. As you can see from his comment, he wasn’t a user at the time. Now Howard is a very active user, following 140 people and has 975 followers. Pretty cool.

Since my original post, I’ve been using Twitter daily it seems. My network on Twitter has grown and I’m getting more and more from it. More sites are building in Twitter functionality too for games, music, and video. And users are doing more with it too.

I’ve also spent a lot of time with Jack, Ev, Biz & Jason over the past year. They are a fantastic team. I admire their passion and dedication to make Twitter into a global communication utility.

Today Twitter announced a new round of investment. And I’m thrilled to join their board of directors along with our investment in the company.

There are a number of message boards that I use quite a bit as my goto source of information. Mostly they are based on some of my personal passions around photography, audio/video & apple computers.

For photography I goto dpreview

For audio & video info, it’s gotta be AVS

And for apple related questions it’s still Apple’s very own forums.

These message boards are alive and thriving with tons of smart people that are motivated by passion and a sense of community.

At the same time, most message boards have a dated user interface, poor search and notification & messaging systems that are lame at best. Some are getting better but many seem stuck. Even the more recent ones at Yahoo groups or facebook groups don’t do it for me. They just don’t seem to have the same sense of identity for these groups in my experience.

Online communities continue to gain speed and size though and that’s the key thing to pay attention to. But they need more applications, tools & services. They should start twittering together, searching together, shopping together, playing together and learning together.

And that’s just a start.

Yesterday I wrote a post about the future of radio.

Well today, our portfolio company Buzzwire announced that their service has just launched on AT&T. Buzzwire is a subscription streaming service that gives subscribers the ability to stream virtually any video or audio to your AT&T phone (except for the iPhone right now) without installing any new software to your phone.

So you can watch videos, listen to your favorite podcast or tune into your favorite radio station on the go. You can also upload mp3s, video, audio and RSS feeds as well. And if you like something you hear/see, you can SMS a link to a friend too.

Mashable has the full story here.

Give it a try.