Featured Top Yadda: Below are excerpts from the discussion on Pinyadda around this VFZ Filmmaker article, “James Cameron : BP Turned Down Help”. On Pinyadda you can follow breaking news from thousands of sites & blogs across the web on topics like: Oil, Environment, Energy Policy.
Click to read the full discussion on Pinyadda.
Cheryl Morris pinned this to Twitter.
BP turned down Cameron’s deep sea expertise and contacts…
Things are moving fast at Pinyadda HQ and we wanted to make sure to keep everyone in the loop about what we’ve been up to. Yaddapalooza was a huge success, with hundreds of people coming out to celebrate our progress and cheer for the future, and we’re super pumped to turn on the gas and really take Pinyadda to the next level. Here’s a quick rundown of the cool stuff we’ve shipped in the last few weeks:
The Newsstand
Our users needed a better way to find new people, sites, and topics to follow that allowed them to do three main things: find a known quantity (e.g. a person or site whose name they were sure of), find unknown quantities with a known criteria (e.g. sites that have content about cars), and browse content by category in a way that was intuitive and fun. We’re pretty happy with the way it came out and we’re eager to hear your feedback about how to make it even better.
New Badges
For the last couple of years, much of the focus regarding the evolution of the web has centered on the concept of the social graph. The social graph, or the digital collective set of personal connections established by users on social networking sites, has laid the foundation for deeper engagement with others online. We update our personal networks on everything from the mundane eating of a sandwich to marriage proposals, separations and births. Simply, our social lives are now hosted online for our worlds to see.
As the web has evolved, and we have evolved with it, we have started to see that “one size fits all” doesn’t apply to graphing our personal connections online, and more particularly it does not apply when hosting different types of user behaviors. This is why we manage and engage with our business connections on Linkedin and not typically on Facebook, to give one example. Considering that social media is still a very young medium, it is safe to expect that more platforms will emerge hosting different connection types and user behaviors.
This weekend I coached students as part of Babson College’s Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program. The program is designed to help first and third year students hone their oral communication, listening, teamwork, leadership, ethics, and decision-making skills. It’s one of the many distinctive programs Babson offers in addition to it’s truly unique, cross-disciplined business education. I’ve recently more keenly appreciated how Babson’s education fosters entrepreneurialism — regardless of if you decide to take specific classes in the entrepreneurship academic division or not.
This week I met with Pinyadda user Max Silver. Max has been using Pinyadda for just a few weeks, but has quickly become one of our most active ‘Power Users’. Max is a senior at Emerson College here in Boston studying Marketing and Communications. A Twitter-aholic, he’s fascinated with the way social products allow him to build a network that he would never otherwise be able to create.
Each week I’ll be conducting an interview that highlights a different user on our site to better understand who our community is, how Pinyadda fits into their lives, and what they like most and think could be better about the product. It’s part of our customer discovery and validation process, and we’re excited to take the learnings and make Pinyadda better. We’re calling it “No User Left Behind.”
A serious need for information
The first user I interviewed is Rob Gonzalez, a Senior Project Manager for Endeca Technologies. Endeca is a leading search application technology company in Cambridge, Mass. that powers 250M+ people to more quickly and easily access information. He started in an engineering role and moved quickly up the ranks to Senior Project Manager. In this role, he plans future releases, meets with both customers and partners, evaluates 3rd party technologies, and more generally is responsible for anything Endeca does in the ETL space from technology to sales. So, he has what he describes as “a serious need for information from a variety of sources to stay on top of my game.”
Like most other startups using the lean startup methodology, we’ve become pretty obsessed with tracking data. We track all kinds of stuff, from internal product metrics to external referrals to conversions via the various funnels we’ve set up. We rely on these numbers to help us make key product decisions, to tell us where we should focus our marketing efforts, and generally to find out what’s working and what’s not. For a company still wiggling our way into product/market fit, these numbers are our currency, and it’s important that we get them right.
We’ve had amazing discussions around article content on Pinyadda this week. The ideas and knowledge being shared is incredible. It underscores how our information system can really advance the power of the collective mind. I also had the pleasure of listening to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Misiek) speak this week, who believes there is an unfulfilled need for a social networking platform for internal use at companies. By enabling and facilitating collective intelligence, Pinyadda could be an effective social networking platform for fostering innovation, communication, and community in the workplace. (more…)
Last Wednesday, amid a sea of reporters and a blinding array of flash bulbs, we opened Pinyadda registration to the public. OK, so that’s not exactly how it went down. 
We did quietly open up registration last week and so far the results have been great. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up; we look forward to hearing from you in the coming weeks about your experience with Pinyadda and how we can make it better. (more…)
On the day of Apple’s Tablet announcement, I got to thinking: what current e-reader is more popular? Outside of sales, which would probably skew in the favor of Amazon’s Kindle because Barnes & Noble’s Nook was only released in November, I thought a good gauge of popularity would be to track online media mentions of each e-reader. For the data, I went to Pinyadda’s index and scanned article titles for “Kindle” and then “Nook”. The results were somewhat surprising to me: (more…)
