Thought Waves

From Twitter’s monthly newsletter

Twitter developed a distributed queue server to route vast numbers
of messages and we named it Starling. Last month, Starling was
released as open source. In addition to giving back to the open
source community, Starling improves as the open source community
makes enhancements and upgrades.

Here is a link to the project [https link]: Twitter Open Source

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- William Shakespeare

Blogs I Read
PikiWiki
DefaceABaby
SpringBreak

Our application is coming tomorrow. Hitchhiker. If you want to learn more send an email to antonio [at] altamirano [dot] org

Weekend apps is an event devoted to developing facebook apps in less than three days. The first night is over and I am happy to announce that my team has a really cool concept for a facebook app. The name, Hitchhiker. The concept, to hitchhike across the world with the help of your friends and to get to know others along the way. You might meet the random hot girl or guy while hitchhiking the planet. Added bonus.

Tomorrow, 12 hours will be devoted to coding Hitchhiker. We’ll see how it goes in terms of adoption. Hopefully this app awakens your inner sense of adventure and exploration. Tomorrow you’ll be able to hitch a ride with us to any destination across the world.

We are in the 8th hour of development and it seems we will get a very basic first version.

It is not only cool that Google is letting folks mess around with their Google logo. It is the fact that this is for schools only. Can you imagine Microsoft even thinking about something like this?

Oddly enough, a couple of days ago HBR came up with a study about the shrinking advantage of brands where Humair Haque discusses how the strongest brand in the world belongs to a company that does “zero” advertisement. IMHO, I believe Google does advertisement in a different way such as the contest they’ve come up with.

Here is how Dennis Hwang designs them.

If your school is interested, here is the link to enter the Doodle4Google contest.

The flaw is to continue to see agencies as such. Don’t hire agencies for the sake of having arms and legs. You can outsource that and it would be less expensive. Your agency needs to be a partner. A true business partner.

Marketing agencies have a shelf life of X time. That leads me to two arguments. The first one, the agency model is broken and needs to be fixed. The second one, and contrary to the first one, the agency model is doing so well that it continues to be replicated time and time again.

For this post, however, I will only concentrate only in SEM agencies. By now, [if you are still reading], youknow you have a viable business model and proper marketing strategy and you have come to the conclusion that search marketing is core to your overall success. Hiring an SEM expert agency or consultant is not the issue anymore. The challenge is figuring out who and how to hire.

Hire folks that will implement your business vision based upon your business goals. SEM will become a core lead generation channel and you have to be sure you have the proper support.

Here are a few ways you can discern:

The agency only does SEO. If you don’t understand what SEO is then it is not a good idea to blindly turn over your website for optimization to a third party.

You should always be involved in the decision making process for the tactics to be used in the optimization.

The agency does not make an effort to understand your business from the get go. If they don’t take the time at the start, there will be no suitable time later.

Your SEM/SEO agency does not understand what information architecture is.

Your SEM/SEO agency is a black box. The black box approach for search is almost always a sign of suboptimal tactics.

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