FiberGeneration

Yepee! I am a Twitter Power-User !

According to Robert Moore of RJ Metrics, "a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better", who published on TechCrunch a well-detailed article on Twitter data from an investor' s perspective, I belong to the smallest portion of Twitter users, with more than 500 followers, over 500 updates, and more than 3,200 tweets sent (excluding the 1,400+ tweets from auto-RT of @FiberNews).

Now the question is: how do I monetize my status ? ;-)

I strongly recommend that you read this article: it's full of interesting informations on how people do use Twitter. For Marketeers of all sorts, that's a gold mine.

Mummy, Governator Is Following Me !

This is the true power of Twitter: break the frontiers and connect together people who normally couldn't be in touch. See the wowing email that I've got today :

Hi, Marc Duchesne (mduchesn).

Gov Schwarzenegger (schwarzenegger) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Gov Schwarzenegger's profile here:
 http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger


Best,
Twitter

--

Twitter Made Simple

Ever wondered what the heck is this "Twitter" everybody is talking about those days ?

Watch the best journalist and interviewer on Earth Jon Stewart explaining the social service (I know, it's a couple of weeks old in the Blogosphere, but it's still very funny ;-)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Fibering Twitterland

For those of you who seek informations and/or jobs in the Optical Communications sector, here are your new companions : FiberNews and FiberJobs, which you can follow on Twitter respectively here and here.

Of course, those are RSS feeds which I've put together thanks to Yahoo!Pipes and other cool Web 2.0 tools (BTW, have you noticed how the expression "Web 2.0" is old fashion those days ?). 

FiberNews delivers news on FTTH worldwide, and FiberJobs delivers job postings related to FTTH (US only for the time being). Simple, isn't ?

Joke Of The Day

I wish my bank account will soon follow the same trend than my Twitter' one.

Go and play to TwitterCounter here.

Twitter For Dummies

For those of you who still wonder what's this 'Twitter' thing everybody in the Blogosphere is writing about, here's THE pitch, by the folks at Common Craft. Just lovely AND effective, as usual.

Twittering FTTH

Seems Asia is leading the way for FTTH Fiber-To-The-Home. See here.

Twitter-Based Marketing Per The Book

Evangelism and Marketing guru Guy Kawasaki has posted a 10-points explanation on how to use Twitter for business. That's "Twitter for Dummies", if you wish: a must read for all of you don't have a Twitter account yet.
I often wrote here and there that I wished we Agilent Musketeers had such a tool at our disposal when we were developing our flagship product: there is no better way to reach and keep in touch with the end-users.
That's why I as many other folks out there are putting Twitter at the center of (product) marketing strategies, whatever "marketing" means for you.

You can start following Guy Kawasaki here. Me: here.

Yeepee-derle !

Times Change : A is on Twitter !

This is the message I've got last night :

From:     twitter-follow-mduchesn=mac[dot][email protected]
Subject:     Agilent Technologies is now following you on Twitter!
Date:     November 11, 2008 11:19:20 PM CEST
To:     mduchesn[at]mac[dot]com

Hi, Marc Duchesne.

Agilent Technologies (Agilent) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Agilent Technologies's profile here:

 http://twitter.com/Agilent

You may follow Agilent Technologies as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

Wow. My former employer is now following me. The question is: how will I convince "them" to hire me again ;-)

A New Web 2.0 App : Feedlytwitterlicious

Since a couple of weeks, I'm posting more and more on Twitter than on this blog, as many people out there in the Blogosphere.
Reading Guy Kawasaki' s advices on how to pick up followers on Twitter, I realized that I do share links for the rest of the Twitterers, but also for myself, using the service as a fast & easy substitute to Delicious.

Actually, each time I find an article interesting for the business in my Feedly pages, I click on the 'Tweet' button below the headline. Boom, the link goes on Twitter. Sometimes, I add a short comment or note after the linked URL, and that's it. Fast and simple sharing.
However, I continue to use Delicious as my main depository for bookmarks, as the tagging feature makes it easy to retrieve information.
You can find my Delicious page here, and follow me on Twitter here.

Monday: No More My Blogging Day

Paul Boutin of Wired gives a pretty accurate look on the Blogosphere 2008. To make it short, amateurs' s weblogs are thing of the past, being replaced by Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook.

I'm 100% on the same page. Blogging requires so much time that either you do it the Seth Godin' short-form, either you keep your blog for the long-form *in-depth* articles.
Since a couple of months now, I'm part of the trend : moving to micro-blogging, thanks to Twitter, keeping FiberGeneration for the "long" stuff.

Actually, I do have plenty of material to publish here, with my different jobs within the Telecoms/Fiber/FTTH world : the many projects open on the Pau Broadband Country, the training & education with eXperide, etc. Unfortunately, Code of Conducts and Confidentiality agreements there hinder me to write about what makes most of my days since a year now. Finding ways to eventually post a couple of news here and there is fun, yet time-consuming : how to avoid legal issues when I want to publish a photo of a field-trial or a short note on a check-point meeting.

Plus, as many of us, I spend lot of time commenting and contributing to discussions on others' s blogs. That's the good-old-Usenet made modern.

Now, the funny part. Almost two years ago, I wrote a post titled "The Asymptotic Twitter Curve", which I started with those words : "Monday is going to be my ' blogging day '." The subject : a newly launched Web 2.0 service so-called Twitter. The post ended with this (really interesting ;-) question : "Today, I wonder if the Web 2.0 thing as a whole is not turning out to be a new Bubble : who cares about what I am doing right now, but myself or my wife ?..." I was then far away of thinking that one day, I would rather tweet than blog. To my defense, I was also far away of thinking that one day, I would have a tiny Internet device in my pocket, 24/7. The iPhone and its myriad of Twitter's clients
: the perfect fit for (micro)bloggers.

By the way : you can tweet me @mduchesn .

The Most Stunning Email I Ever Got

Read this. Now I have to be worth Guy's choice ;-)

From:     [email protected]
Subject:     Guy Kawasaki is now following you on Twitter!
Date:     October 18, 2008 9:59:10 PM CEDT
To:     [email protected]


Hi, Marc Duchesne.

Guy Kawasaki (guykawasaki) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Guy Kawasaki's profile here:

 http://twitter.com/guykawasaki


Best,
Twitter

iPhone, Broadband Fiber, Web 2.0, and me

[updated 09/17/08, from a Mac ;-) ]

I'm typing this post on my iPhone 3G, whilst enjoying a delicious tartare at the "Berry", one of my favorite restaurants here in Pau. Connected to the Net via 3G, of course. The last couple of days have been quite busy, as my boss Jean-Pierre Jambes and I are preparing a series of strategic events over the next two weeks. Among those events, there's the presentation on Thursday of the "FTTH School" project that we've been working on since last winter. Shall the Gods of Broadband here us, it's going to be a sort of World Premiere, with a pretty intensive use of ultra-broadband to deliver training courses and stuff. The other event we're preparing : the Odebit'08 conference, to be held in Paris next week. I've been spending the afternoon creating and editing the Pau Broadband Country' presentation. A slideshow made with Keynote of course, made of photos and a video. And designed for... the iPhone : we won't use a laptop to run the slideshow on the booth, but an iPhone connected to the larger display with the wonderful Apple-made AV cable. There's many more than one thing to share with you : how I recently boosted my network and started some really intersting experience sharing thanks to Linkedin' a Discussions feature; or how I know twitt more than ever, thanks to the iPhone 3G and Twitterific. But I have to stop writing, as the tartare is getting cold (joke ;-).

Customer Service At The Web 2.0 Age

David Fisher of What Is Noise has a must-read article on Customer Service via Social Media : "How NOT to handle Customer Service via Social Media". Shall you use Twitter or any other Web 2.0 tool to keep in touch with your customers, or shall you be still running an Enterprise 1.0 type of company, the 12 points listed are the very key requirements for any efficient/successful/committed Customer Care/Support/Service center.

Thanks to my own experience with building a such a service within the Optical Network Test division at Agilent Technologies *** years ago (hey, 1999-2000, that was even before the SMS became mainstream ;-), I would add a 13th one : Apologize even when that's your customer who's faulty. Because you're the one who brought the product to the customer.

thanks to Jean-Luc Raymond for the heads-up.

*** personal note : my warmest greetings to my fellow El Nino Juan-Luis, and to my lovely twitter Sandra. Good to see you're doing well in the T&M business.

Alleluia : Twittervision on the iPhone is there !

Just installed Twittervision on my iPhone. Absolutely stunning app. The potential uses in business are countless. I better hurry up creating my Web 2.0 start-up in Pau ;-)

The time of the twits

Step by step, month after month, the Web 2.0 is changing the way we can use data and information.
See here how you can mash your twits up. Thanks to Dipity.

For many businesses, it's time to think different.