(yes I know, quite an ambitious title)

What if Facebook only allowed you 75 friends?

The continued rise of Twitter.com has been attributed to many things by many people. Beyond the ambient intimacy, portability, business uses, networking, simplicity, etc, is one thing that may not have been blogged about quite as much: In a bandwidth-is-cheap storage-is-cheap development-is-cheap world, setting limits can create freedom.

Twitter.com limits all conversation atoms (a unit of measure for posts, replies, direct messages) to 140 characters. That’s it. No exceptions. This forces atoms to be succinct, without artifice or flowery stuff or suckuptitude or any of that capital-m-Marketing that more freedom allows.

Turns out that setting limits is a pretty effective way to get people to say what they want to say and then sit back. I’d be very interested to see what effect putting the 10 minute time limit on YouTube videos did for overall creativity, usage, and density of videos created over time. (paging Mediaeater, can Trendrr demonstrate that).

Being social network fatigued as I am (seriously, if one more site asks me to enter my email address, then upload a photo, then shout at my gmail contacts, I’m quitting the internets.), I hope this trend will expand. Another site that is doing something interesting with this paradigm is 12seconds.tv, which is exactly what it sounds like: Create and share videos, each limited to 12 seconds. From their FAQ:

Why only 12 seconds
Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.

Note to people with pre-existing sites:Imposing limits where users are USING a particular featureset is a BAD IDEA. Don’t do it, and if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So there you have it, sports fans. If you’re thinking of launching a new site with community function or content creation abilities, maybe you should think about using a limit as a feature.

In 2001, when I first became aware of the Podcast concept, it was still called Audioblogging, and was very clunky (basically there were no ‘podcast clients’ or iTunes, it was just an RSS feed with an audio enclosure.) The adoption of RSS itself was in its infancy, years before the ubiquitous became standard on all sites. I was not particularly taken with the format, as there didn’t seem to be any practical use for it beyond repurposing pre-existing media into a format that didn’t really have any easy way to consume it.

The podcast format didn’t really start to break through until Adam Curry (@adamcurry) began pushing it as an original content format with his Daily Soure Code series, still going strong. But it wasn’t until April of 2005 when Apple added native podcast support in iTunes 4.9 that there became any chance of the format growing.

I really started paying attention to the format as a potential channel for compelling original content in 2006, when someone at work introduced me to Joe Vella, a long time jazz new media guy (remember JazzOnln.com? That was him) who found himself wanting to create content for the web that was intimate and told a story in a way that had been lost since the consolidation of radio. We started doing a series for Yo-Yo Ma, continued on to some Broadway titles, and at the moment we’ve got about 100 episodes created ranging from a 28-episode series about Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (which I’m really proud of) to another 25 episodes around Stephen Sondheim.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (which is much more interesting): The WHY.

I know in my day-to-day interactions with people, I talk a lot about Content being very important and a driver. Ironically, my blog has not been the best example of that. I do have a lot to say, and I will be posting here more regularly in order to say it. A lot of my musings can be found via Twitter, and there are many many links that I’d like to be able to comment on flowing through the Linkblog on the side, powered by my Delicious.com account. To start down the path, here’s a video by Christopher Penn that summarizes in a remarkable manner the reason why your business should (or should not) be in the podcast world. Important points: Metrics don’t matter, reaction matters. Podcasting is easy. Focus, focus, focus.

Link: Christopher Penn at the Inbound Marketing Summit

1. go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
the first wikipedia article you get is the name of your band

2. go to random quotes: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
the last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your
first album.

3. go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days”
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

From Vicki at Planetary Group

OK, I like the guy and he has good ideas, but I don’t know about this one… Now, if it came with a free miniature PDF file…

Seth Godin, Marketing Action Figure – Archie McPhee®