Daniel Gergès Blog

Reminder for myself

Make a post on the new ULike, which really really rocks.

Weak Ties

Weak Ties are people you've met and with whom you maintain loose relationships.

For example most of my Twitter follower are weak ties (want to experiment? follow me on Twitter).

But Weak doesn't mean unvaluable.

For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out.

This is short quote from this article about the growing importance of feeds and I highly encourage you to read it if you want to understand how people get hooked to Facebook or Twitter.

Navigating from the Couch

I was just checking Russel's Blog, and I found this post about very interesting. Russel is basically proposing that video and music sites should propose a *.tv version specifically tailored for a navigation on our big TV flat screens as they sometime do for mobile devices.

This makes perfect sense. Traditional sites are often a pain in the ass to navigate on a TV. Not easy to use a mouse where you're in the couch. That's why Free (a french ISP) is proposing its "TeleSites" which are basically a set of  HTML coding guidelines and a few XHTML extensi enabling navigation through the remote control and media controls.

This discussion can also be extended to music sites. A few weeks ago I was at a Barbecue at a friend's house, he was using a laptop pluged on its 22 inches TV with Deezer (a French legal music streaming service). I remember to have thought that such an interface should propose full screen ads instead of the traditional Web ads that you clearly don't look at when you're having a beer with the friends in the living room.

In my first startup, Wokup, we designed a rendering technology enabling mobile rendering of Web sites, this is exactly the same kind of technology which is needed for these kind of apps. If I was looking at new business opportunities, I would definitely be trying to inspect how people browsing habits are changing : how they do discover content, how the consume it and how the socialize around it when they are not on their laptop.