Wednesday, February 11, 2009

comcast is fine now but Twitter's gone bonkers... lets see what Seth thinks....

Seth, (3rd comment)

I thought you might find this interesting:

Peter (re: craigslist but seems to be relevant to Wikepedia-Wikimedia also, as far as strategy):

"The secret to Craig's community-building exercise was the following: in the late 90's he realized nobody would be too excited to help promote a service by a corporation. So he registered 2 companies - one non-profit and the other one for-profit.

When he expanded out of his SF base - specifically to NYC, he approached a variety of local groups and organization through his non-profit arm, selling the idea of a community web site and ask for their support in promoting it. He did not say anything about the other entity. When the traffic started flowing, a couple of years later, the "other" craigslist stepped in [and] cashed in."

http://craigslistcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/articles-are-still-disappointing-but.html

If true (and it certainly appears plausible, consistent with ebay's complaint -- it actually makes sense of some information that was rendered incomprehensible apparently by craigslist' editing out of things it didn't want the public to know), doesn't it look like Jimmy is trying to do th same thing, albeit much less successfully?

He's trying to do it *after the fact* -- he did not have a non-profit and a for profit registered at the same time.

Delia

P.S. I was going to try to see if I could get some info regarding what Peter said by using Twitter, both the actual things that happened back then and whether or not this strategy is in fact legal (doesn't look like it to me) but... Twitter is acting silly! (I came up with a very strong password that I...predictably, forgot... and now they tell me they sent me the email with the info on how to change the password but when I enter the address in the browser they tell me they can't verify that th user requested a password reset... and there is nothing to do then ... try again... just to get the same result -- pretty frustrating! D.

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