I’m not sure why you’d do this, but I saw a tweet from Andrew Hyde about a service to shorten the URL for your Facebook profile. The service is at fbook.us. I tried it out and it does work. I’m just not sure why you care to do this. Are long Facebook URLs really a problem for anyone? Given that they’ve only served 228 as I write this, I guess not. Well, whatever.
Tag Archive for 'twitter'
Back in December Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright scored a big PR boost for their company, Appcelerator, by getting Marc Fleury to join their advisory board.
Most people would be happy and then take it easy based on this. Yeah, not these guys. From Jeff’s tweets, I learned that there was an article written about them and they were a finalist for an award.
Geek note: when you look at Jeff’s Twitter page, you’ll see he has customized it with the Appcelerator logo. He’s serving that logo off of Amazon’s S3 web service. Cool. It’s costing him .114 cents each time that image is served. Yeah, I did the math. Yeah, I’m a geek.
The article is a pretty nice writeup in Information Week. I hadn’t realized that their efforts might be causing issues at Adobe but it sure seems that way. It’s a good thing to disrupt the status quo. That’s what startups are all about.
On top of that, they are a finalist in the Jolt Awards. Honestly, I don’t know anything about these awards but the fact that they’re from Dr. Dobb’s Journal must mean they are pretty legitimate. By the way, Appcelerator’s competition for the award includes Adobe and Sun. Not bad company to be in.
They’re pretty secretive about who is using the Appcelerator platform so I thought I’d go trolling. One I know is the Startup Weekend Atlanta company Skribit. I know this because Jeff and crew were involved in the development and they were able to get that going very quickly. The only other site I could find (honestly, I didn’t spend much time trolling) was Team One Eye which seems to be run by one of Appcelerator’s employees. I’d say it’s a a good vote of confidence if Appcelerator’s own employees are using their stuff for their non-work projects.
Appcelerator has been around for less than 2 years (including the time under the previous name - Hakano). I count eleven people on LinkedIn that say they work at Appcelerator (although Nolan’s profile still lists him as being at Vocalocity). Pretty sizeable and I think they’re growing fast. This will be a fun one to watch and could be another smashing Atlanta hit. By the way, they are self funded and have grown through revenue. That makes this an even better story!
Just saw this tweet and I laughed out loud.
I just stumbled onto the fact that someone at Georgia Tech is sending sports updates via Twitter. How cool is that? They even took the time to update the background layout of their profile on Twitter. With only 19 followers clearly they haven’t gotten the word out on this. How about a link on some Georgia Tech website?
I’ve been scrounging around to find some new sources of information from Atlanta’s movers and shakers. In the process, I discovered that two big Atlanta corporations, at one point, embraced the idea of Twittering. 
The first is Delta and the second is EarthLink (are there any I missed?). The problem is that the last update from Delta was seven months ago and the last update from EarthLink was five months ago. This is a shame, I think. At one point someone at both companies thought it would be a good idea to connect to fans of the company. Although these efforts weren’t wildly successful (149 followers for Delta and 70 followers for EarthLink) it was a great, and inexpensive, way to conduct community outreach. I think both companies could have used these channels to develop a better following. Both could have publicized short-lived deals (perhaps some kind of coupon codes sent only through Twitter - has anyone done this yet?) and grown a vibrant community of followers. Yeah, I know, Twitter is pretty niche and mainly the domain of the tech savvy but still if you develop a following with this crowd you’ll develop a good base of fans.
By the way, Delta gets points for recently starting and maintaining their blog (running the latest WordPress even!) while EarthLink shuttered theirs on September 28, 2007 (for comparison, it was/is running Movable Type).
Finally, if you’ve got a blog and write about technology, startups, or angel funding/venture capital in Atlanta, the South, or the East Coast, leave a comment and I’ll make sure I keep tabs on what you’re writing about.