March 2009

The job search site, Simply Hired, has announced its expansion to Germany, Spain and France. Simply Hired already has job search sites for the U.S., Australia, Canada, India and the U.K. and has aggregated 5 million jobs worldwide.

“Each of Simply Hired’s websites is tailored for the job seeker, with features and functionality that empower them to lead the pack of candidates applying for any given job,” said Sachin Shah, director of product management, Simply Hired. “By design, the Simply Hired websites show job seekers their requested results and then enable them to click directly to the originating website, facilitating the most direct interaction with the employer.”

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Jimmy Wales launched Wikia Search a little over a year ago. His idea was to build a user-generated search. It opened to not-so-great fanfare and the dismal economy didn’t help things. Wales said that due to a reassessment of priorities, he’s nixing Wikia Search.

Not all Wikia products are suffering a dark fate. Wikia Answers is proving to be quite popular, which holds with the current trend in the popularity of Answers sites.

Wales hopes to return to his Wikia Search project during future, more profitable times. He holds strong to his belief in openness and transparency in search.

Recently, Visual Design Lead Doug Bowman left Google because he felt it was too constricting of an environment for a designer. I wasn’t surprised. Marissa Mayer holds a tight leash on all things Google design-wise. Managing a design effort that’s based on an old style serif font with primary colors and micromanaged by an executive with a programming background is probably not the dream of most cutting edge designers.

But don’t feel bad for Bowman. The hottest tech company out there right now has picked him up. Twitter has tapped Bowman to be their Creative Director.

When you think of Twitter and design, a few things come to mind:

• A very bubbly logo
• A bird
• Small birds attempting to lift a very infamous whale

It will be interesting to see where Bowman takes Twitter. There’s no doubt the company is evolving. With the inevitable monetization methods on the horizon, design will likely play a key role.

But design also has its role in simply updating Twitter as is. Twitter has tweaked the front page a lot since its inception, from testing a search box to a sidebar overhaul. The design efforts have been squarely under co-founder Biz Stone’s responsibilities.

Of course, Biz is a very busy dude right now, so hiring a Creative Director appears to be a wise delegation.

At SES New York last week, I was amazed that the buzz generated by Guy Kawasaki’s keynote about “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media” lasted more than 24 hours. Well, now it’s a week later and everyone’s still talking about the implications of what the author of Reality Check and Founding Partner of Garage Technology Ventures said in his bully pulpit.

For example, check out Andrew Goodman’s latest post in Traffick: “Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter? (Part I).” Goodman says, “I’m relatively new to Twitter, but then again, I’m not slow , so I have seen these kinds of trends come and go. Mostly, since the late 1990’s, what we’ve seen are spammers in various channels tell us that they’re the cool ones and not really spamming.”

And then as quietly and calmly as someone who is about to take you to the woodshed, Goodman adds, “I’d love to be able to make the point that it’s not about the man, it’s about the tactics. As honorable as that might be, it’s impossible to separate the two… as you’ll see.”

You’re going to have to read Goodman’s next 17 paragraphs for yourself. I haven’t seen this kind of outburst by a mild mannered Canadian since Molson ran its extremely popular ad, “The Rant”, in 2000.

However, let me give you one small sample: “If everyone listened to Guy Kawasaki and admired his Twitter tactics, Twitter would start looking more and more like a digital trailer park.”

I’m just glad that I don’t live in Buffalo anymore. Or, I would have been blistered by the heat from nearby Toronto.

Maybe everything on the Twitter front will have cooled down by the time SES Toronto is held June 8-10, 2009. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Remember, Molson’s commercial, “The Rant”, was a remarkable success, spawning a number of parodies and copycats. This includes William Shatner’s variation, “I am not a Starfleet commander.”

So, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this.

I know that Twitter has an 140-character limit. Now, if only we could limit responses to Kawasaki’s keynote to 140 Tweets.

A new MySpace mobile application set to debut this summer will support Microsoft Windows Mobile as well as Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight is technology similar to Adobe’s Flash that powers rich media.

“We are pleased to bring MySpace users the benefits and flexibility of Microsoft’s platforms,” said Aber Whitcomb, chief technology officer of MySpace. “Our relationship enables app developers to use Silverlight to create engaging MySpace apps and allows Windows Mobile users to have a more personal MySpace experience on their phone.”

MySpace already has mobile applications for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Sidekick, Palm, and Nokia.

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