Louis Gray Archive

SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has posted on the company blog that beginning May 11, there will be a premium paid upgrade option available at a one-time fee of $20. SocialToo describes their service as, “…can help you be a social networking power user. Keep your follower lists in sync across networks, and get daily updates.” They can also send out surveys to your followers. SocialToo advisor Louis Gray has a good overview of the service.

Jesse notes regarding the new pricing option, “As of today you can now pay a 1-time $20 fee which, when it goes into effect Monday, May 11, will put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account, meaning a much more accurate and reliable service for you.”

My only concern with the $20 one-time fee is that he has lost nearly all chance to get more revenue from his power users. I assume many of the SocialToo power users will pay the $20 which will provide a quick stream of cash. I’d rather see him set the upgrade as a yearly fee – this way in a year Jesse can bring in new features and grab another set of funds. At this point his only chance to gain more revenue from those newly-paying users would be to offer more services and hope that they will upgrade again.

Jesse also notes that most of the SocialToo offering will continue to be free for all users.

Last month we announced that we won the high priced bidding for Matthew. He’s been a real asset to the team and we are noticing a huge traffic boost since he started. His smile has won over many startups and we are getting more news than ever before. And my gosh, can this kid digg? Just like his father, he’s a social media expert. Percival better watch out, he’s got competition now!

During one of his naps (in his contract, he gets 2 per day), I was able to grab this photo of him at his desk. Normally all CN employees start with a PC desktop and have to work their way up to a Macbook Pro but Matthew cried and cried and finally I gave in. But I told him under no circumstances is he going to get an iPhone 3G! We have to draw the line somewhere!

We are still looking for an events manager and head of blogger relations.

Just so I don’t receive any further "congrats on your baby" emails, Matthew is actually Louis Gray’s son. :)

There’s been a few exciting things I remember as a kid growing up including: when Hogan slammed Andre, getting my first GameBoy and working at the transit museum. But those totally pale in comparison to the announcment made this morning that TinyURL now supports custom URLs.

It’s all the talk this morning! Louis Gray was able to take a 2-line announcement and turn it into a full product review. Louis points to a post by Steve Gillmor – unfortunately my GilmorDecoder hasn’t arrived yet so I can’t comment on that post.

Gray is clearly mislead, it’s probably because he ate too many brats last night. He notes, "You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren’t being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site."

And now, ladies and gents, here’s an example of why what he just wrote makes no sense :) – Here’s a TinyURL I just created – here, click this: http://tinyurl.com/seagate (don’t worry it’s not malware or Rick Astley). Now do you see why this isn’t going to protect you any better than before? In fact, it might be worse because now the evil people can use URLs that look like legit companies only to send you somewhere bad. I imagine the email scammers will love this new feature.

If TinyURL wanted to offer some new features that would be seriously beneficial, they could add account functionality to save created URLs into lists. They could also offer statistics which could lead to even more goodness as they could show hot and top links and create real content discovery. Perhaps TinyURL could offer a stumbleupon-style feature as well.

In all seriousness, this is a feature that everyone’s asked TinyURL to create but I don’t know if it’s really that important. It will make it easier for the linker but the same for the linkee. I certainly hope that TinyURL users don’t stop linking directly to Web sites and instead link to TinyURLs. 

Most times, the TinyURL is behind the scenes and never heard from. Do you think you are really more likely to click a URL on Twitter if it says http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft than http://www.tinyurl.com/4=*&25c35s? Doubt it. Trust the source, not the URL.

I use MooURL because it’s cuter and looks better.