Software Job Listing FAIL

So Google Alerts (terms: albany software) popped this gem this morning:

"Amazing Position"

"VP of Product Development & Support"

"An Albany area software company seeks a talented individual to provide strategic leadership in the planning, direction and oversight for all product development and support. This individual must be experienced in the organization and management of a software operation. The ideal candidate must possess solid communication and people management skills along with the requisite technical skills."

...

"Assist in the development of a structure or framework that integrates all departments with other Senior Management to facilitate communication and decision making."

...

"Resume MUST be mailed."

FAIL.

Here, allow me to instantly produce that structure or framework for you with this WONDERFUL bit of technology from 1965.

VP of product development for a "software" company -- and they don't accept resumes via email? The only thing missing here is really, really bad clip art of a representative dinosaur. Let me fix that.



For all of those who are just dying to apply, check it out.

Giving Disqus a try

I've been far from satisfied with Blogger's commenting system, so I'm giving Disqus a try. This should be the first post with Disqus commenting enabled. I'm sorry for making you sign up for yet another service, but I feel that it has enough value for all concerned that it's worth the five minutes of your time. Thanks in advance!

The integration process seems pretty straightforward. I'll document it in an update to this post, or as a new post, after I finish testing Disqus.

UPDATE: The integration process, for Blogger at least, couldn't be simpler. Big thumbs up to Disqus.

Big happenings this week?

Rumors are running rampant about renewed Microhoo talks. Scoble is also proclaiming Microsoft's intent, per John Furrier, to buy Facebook outright, and close it up, turning this from "Facebook vs. Google" to "Microsoft vs. the Web".

What will this mean? To most of us, not much. Digital natives, however, I'm sure wait with bated breath. If Microsoft consolidated a position in search, and landed a major (the premier?) social networking asset, will it open a cloud computing platform a la Google App Engine to fill that gap in its offerings? As an integrated whole, and speaking as a .NET-head, that would be one SWEET setup. Speaking as an advocate for openness, transparency, portability and competition, however, I'd have to note some concerns.

Now if only Windows Mobile could be made a true competitor, outside the enterprise sector.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to pique interest, peak traffic, and make news.

Why Twitter Matters

If Business Week says so it must be so, right?

Quite rightly calling Twitter the "microblogging rage," BW also acknowledges the inescapable "drivel." It's true -- as a lifestreaming-leaning medium, there's plenty of noise (even without considering the Twam.) Plenty of very interesting people have unfortunately unfollowed me due to my own loquacious use of the service.

More importantly, BW touches on some of the bottom line, business-relevant facts of Twitter. Traffic has blown up. Major corporations are using it to enhance their relationship with their customers (Comcast, H&R Block, Hormel) and increase sales (Dell). A rich ecology of third party apps thrives on top of it.

BW also touches on a topic near and dear to the hearts of all Twitterers -- the not-infrequent service outages. Some have blamed this on Twitter's Ruby on Rails platform; the recent departure of chief architect Blaine Cook, Ruby evangelist extraordinaire, has left the question of technological direction wide open.

Twitter's major backer right now is Union Square Ventures; you can find partner Fred Wilson on Twitter daily. With a history of investments including del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!) and Feedburner (acquired by Google for ~$100 million USD) and a current portfolio including Etsy and tumblr, you have to think these guys have this thing down.

That said, BW brings up that other favorite Twitter topic -- monetization. What's the model for a microblogging service? The new Japanese-localized Twitter is experimenting with advertising. With the incredible number of third party apps, you'd have to think Twitter begs to go freemium. But the question remains: what the heck IS Twitter worth?

Twitter isn't a fad. It isn't just a trendy toy. It's a tool and a platform that adds value to any business that needs to communicate, whether that's with a community, with clients, with partners, with suppliers or with talent. Twitter is here to stay.

UPDATE: Excellent traffic stats and analysis available at the Compete blog.

Some highlights:

Twitter's Follow:Following Ratio: The one that matters

I'm sure by now I come across as obsessed by Twitter, and maybe that's not an unfair assessment. It's a unique tool that allows extremely easy discovery of "interesting people," and allows you to engage in fairly intimate interaction with those people.

Scoble has huffed and puffed and blown the house down over his "you are who you follow" assessment, which, to me, reeks of grade school cliquey-ness. Why does it matter who I follow? Why does it matter who you follow? Use Twitter however it suits you.

However, there IS one metric I would like to see: on average, how many people do the people who follow me, follow? With what kind of standard deviation, what's the mode? I think that would give you a fairly objective measure of the value of your contribution to Twitter, by gaging the selectivity of those who select you.

Does that make me hypocritical in my use of Twitter? I "follow" over 1300 people, and am "followed" by something like 1400. I certainly follow some very interesting, delightful, informative folks. There are definitely a number of people I interact with regularly. At the same time, there's no question, I follow some people who contribute little or nothing to my life most of the time. People with whom I've never had a conversation. People whose tweets have never twinked my noggin'.

There's definitely an imbalance of value in Twitter. Call it the Great Friend Divide, a la Scoble, if you will. I personally feel that I get more value out of interacting with a large number of interesting, intelligent people through Twitter. However, for every additional person I follow, that's additional segmentation in the attention I pay to my Twitternet -- any one node on my net tends to get less attention.

In other words, there's more value in being followed by someone who follows fewer people, than someone who follows a lot of people. Once you reach a certain point, the only way to get a message through to you is with @s or direct messaging -- which is where Twitter becomes transient, and loses a lot of its initial intimacy potential.

I suppose it all depends on how you use it, what you expect out of it, and what the people who follow you expect out of you. Maybe that's what makes Twitter great.