Twitter in the entertainment world :-)

AMC has every reason to be protective of its hit show Mad Men, but it came close to smothering a free and innovative way to market the show today, saved only by its own interactive ad agency, Deep Focus. Mad Men has established the network as delivering HBO-worthy dramas, and the show itself is a highly entertaining and well-shaded character study in the world of early 60s advertising. The show is so good, in fact, that anonymous fans took it upon themselves to start up and maintain Twitter accounts for the various characters. Show centerpiece and cooly charamastic junior partner Don Draper has been Twittering, as has office bombshell Joan Holloway and budding copywriter Peggy Olson, along with a host of other characters both major and minor.

Normally, this would seem like exactly the type of viral marketing put out by AMC, but in this case it can be safely assumed AMC isn’t behind it. Why? Because the network sent Twitter a DMCA request to shut the accounts down, according to Venture Beat. It took, according to Silicon Alley Insider, some “gentle prodding” by AMC’s Web advertising agency Deep Focus to allow the Twitter sites to remain active. After all, if fans are crazed enough to microblog about the characters for the show, then why not let them? As of yet, none of the people involved have used the Twitter accounts in anyway that AMC could interpret as harmful to their property.

Which isn’t to say that the takeaway is that every time a random person on the Internet starts appropriating a company’s brand, the company should let them. As Alan Wolk over at The Toadstool points out, many brands would have much to lose by letting someone off the reservation take on any role as their spokesperson, as Exxon found out when someone created a fake Twitter profile as an Exxon spokesperson.

What exactly constitutes marketing is in flux, and this episode shows how some companies are struggling (and why it’s great to have a good agency on your side).

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Twitter at the Office

Andy McAfee didn’t quite understand all the buzz about Twitter. The Harvard Business School professor has built quite a following around his work looking at how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking can be great collaboration tools in the enterprise. But Twitter? 140-character communications?

Then he fired up his own account and quickly began to see the possibilities, not only for building a personal network, but also as an office tool. Writing in his blog post, The Twit’s Progress, McAfee observes:

“I think Twitter is a fantastic technology for enterprise purposes, especially if it lets users categorize their tweets so that they’re not just a single undifferentiated stream (as a number of people pointed out, hashtags are a current means of accomplishing this). An enterprise version of Twitter would let communities of practice, interest groups, and other collaborations quickly and easily self-organize, swap thoughts, and keep each other up to date. I’d expect that these collaborations would be based primarily around topics as opposed to around people, which makes the ability to categorize all the more important.”

Twitter users, what do you think? Do you think this technology could be a useful addition to daily life in business? What are the barriers? Should an Enterprise Twitter version be developed?

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BBC web site re-designed

Run your web applications on Google's infrastructure

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It's free to get started. Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly pageviews.

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Kwippy

What is kwippy? - a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network

Why another microblogging app when there are already plenty out there? - There is twitter, pownce, jaiku, and 10 other similar ones. Though all of these promote small posts, each has a different kind of social network.

On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.

Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messenger.

In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys (i got a raise), sorrows (i flunked my english papers), their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list. And like in the real world when a real friend introduces you to another person, the chances that you hit it off are greater. There’s this trust thing which is automatic.

So there - kwippy has a social network which gets real friends, friends you could meet. And it stores all your status messages, which become your emotional timeline.

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Adfairtising v Signal Digital (Toyota case)

Designer's Guide to Magento

You have heard about the unbelievable open-source features Magento offers right out the box. You spare no time seeing it in action, have oo-ed and aah-ed over it all - over and over again.

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Six Apart Launches Blogs.com

Six Apart announced today that it has officially launched Blogs.com in an attempt to “find the best blogs on the Web.” And even better, the company said that it’s willing to let any blogger submit their site for consideration.

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Is The First Google Android Device Coming Sooner Than Expected?

The first device based on Google Android, the Web giant's open source mobile platform, may be coming sooner than expected, possibly as early as September.

TmoNews, which calls itself the "unofficial T-Mobile blog," said the first Android-powered device could go up for presale on Sept. 17, which goes against original rumors that Android-based devices have been plagued by delays and most likely won't hit the streets until next year at the earliest.

Read the full article here.

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HTC’s Android handset to be called the “Dream”?

Google's Android phone to go on sale in September?

T-Mobile USA could put the new HTC Android phone on sale for select customers as early as the middle of September, according to the blog TmoNews.

The news comes as other rumors circulate that Android phones could be delayed into 2009. But TmoNews says it has a reliable source that says the Android device made by smartphone manufacturer HTC will go on sale through T-Mobile USA on September 17.

The price tag will be $399 full retail or about $150 for a subsized phone with a two-year contract. The site also said that only existing T-Mobile customers will be able to buy the phone during the presale timeframe with other customers able to buy the phone a few weeks later in early October.

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Sleipnir, No.1 Japanese web browser, kicks off Global Site and expansion of overseas users

Sleipnir is designed to be a highly customizable browser that you can configure to suit your individual needs. With Sleipnir, you can create your ideal browser by changing the design, skin, and visual appearance. You can also add custom functionality to Sleipnir with a wide range of plugins and user scripts. Users love Sleipnir for its unique blend of high-performance and customizability.

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35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action

MASHABLE.COM: We’ve discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. Lest you think there’s a limit to how you can connect with business and customer facing audiences, we’ve assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and it represents a wide variety of businesses, industries and social media tools. As you can see, engagement takes many forms. Some are likely to generate more discussions with the company while others might result better connections between customers. Some will fade away over the next 6-12 months while others will continue to grow and evolve.

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Brian Solis' Social Map

The Conversation Prism

Scoble's Social Media Starfish