(By Richard Holway 5.00pm 23rd Feb 09) Over the last few months I have been bombarded by people asking why I’m not on Twitter. I was an early adopter of Facebook (which I love mainly for keeping up with family and friends) and LinkedIn (which so far I have found totally useless). Some of my friends have been feeding their Tweets onto Facebook and the standard of comment has been banal. Recent tweets have included “I am in a car wash” and “Preparing lentils for dinner”. My life does not have room for that!Twitter now has 6m followers (tiny compared to Facebook’s 160m) and has grown 10-fold in the last year. Despite having no revenue – and no realistic revenue model - Twitter is currently valued at $250m and apparently recently turned down a $500m offer from Facebook (who also have no revenue – and no realistic revenue model)
But friends say I must give it a go – so I am.
You can now follow me as WiseGreyOwl on Twitter. I’ll give it 2 weeks to see if it changes my view.
What I need now is some Twitters to follow. So, if you can recommend some really good ones for me to follow, pls ‘Tweet’ the WiseGreyOwl.
Why WiseGreyOwl?
On 3rd Dec 2002, the FINANCIAL TIMES ran a series entitled “The ten people every senior executive in tech needs to know”. Amazingly I was listed!
”Richard Holway is the wise grey owl of the UK technology sector, which he has been involved in for 36 years, 16 of them as an influential, fiercely independent and highly-respected analyst. His deep and intricate knowledge of the technology industry allowed him to be one of the few analysts to recognise and describe the technology and internet boom of recent years for what it was: a crazy, passing fad. In 1992 his company, which was sold to Ovum in 2000, began the Boring Award, for companies that recorded 10 years of consistent earnings growth. It has been awarded”
Many people said I should use the name – indeed I am the proud owner of http://www.wisegreyowl.com/. Hence at last finding a use for the nom de plume on Twitter.
From Robin Raven at Fujitsu
ReplyDeleteRichard,
A belated thanks for this – subscribed!
I just saw your post on twitter. I agree that it is hard filter the noise.
However I would recommend CNN breaking news, Gartner, Jemima Kiss (guardian tech correspondent) Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), and Fred Wilson (Partner at Union Square VC house) and JP Rangaswami (CIO BT Design) are all relatively good value.
Apologies for the lack of @names, but in its wisdom our powers that be have added Twitter to the Facebook and youtube list of banned sites. (A debate for another day!)
You can search for them on twitter easily though.
Incidentally, I am @generationwhy, but would be the first to admit that it’s not necessarily in your interest to follow me!
Look forward to seeing if you are a convert – 140 characters can be an excellent exercise in discipline…
Incidentally, I would have posted this as a comment on the site, but it seems the facility has disappeared…!
Regards,
Robin