That’s a terrible alliteration, I know.  But I’m excited, because…

…I’m lucky enough to be among those few beta testers invited by the Flock team, and I must say that this has such potential to change the way we browse.

A few notes on my initial experience:  When I first opened the browser, it asked me to import my favorites.  Typical, right?  Wrong.  It’s fully integrated into del.icio.us, the social bookmarks manager, and it’s seamless.  After entering my del.icio.us account information, Flock automatically synced with my account and imported my online bookmarks.

But wait, there’s more!  Flock integrates blog publishing directly into the browser interface via a pop-up window.  This would eliminate the need for bookmarklets.  the process was very simple: I typed in my blog address, Flock detected it and I supplied my username and password.  Easy as cake. 

The publishing aspect is particularly useful because you can drag and drop almost any type of content into it while you’re browsing.  It also has a “topbar,” where you can open up your Flickr photostream and drop in photos.  You can also tag your posts and apply WYSIWYG formatting on the fly. 

I am, in fact, writing this post with Flock’s built-in blog functionality.  It’s really easy and completely eliminates the need for, like I said, a bookmarklet or even logging into your blog’s admin.

So far, Flock gets a thumbs-up.  The browsing is even faster than Firefox and it’s got well-designed features. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Go get Flock for yourself!

A fantastic post by D. Keith Robinson over at Asterisk points out the excess supply of Web products and how this seeming over-dilution underscores the need for differentiation or action.

Robinson argues that being first, best or different is the key to getting attention and, in the end, building a successful venture.

When it comes to building a product or brand you want to be:

The first.

The best.

Different.

The isn’t much room for anything else. Sure, you can be second, or maybe third, and still do alright, but if you’re entering a market that is flooded with competition, you better damn well be the best or no one is going to pay you much attention.

He uses the example of flickr, which essentially transformed itself and its business model three times before it hit paydirt.

Sometimes something small can make all the difference. Focusing on one particular aspect of a problem can help. That’s what Flickr did. They nailed a piece of the pie and did it so well it made them really stand out. They were different in that they had a unique take on sharing photos and they did it very well. The idea wasn’t new and they weren’t the first, so they changed the idea.

In the end, he doesn’t downplay the immense opportunity presented by the Web, but emphasizes the importance of flexibility and thinking different(ly).

What does social networking mean for the online world?

We hear about online social networks all the time. There are even blogs centered on the topic — I, for example, frequently read Weblogs, Inc.’s Social Software Weblog and Corante’s Many to Many group blog.

Social networking in the physical sense is easy. We create, maintain and expand our personal and professional networks all the time. It’s human. It’s natural. And it’s essential.

Social networking in the online sense becomes more difficult. I believe that social networks are translated into the virtual world by way of social software. While social software includes a number of elements, each are enablers of real-world social networks.

The elements overshadowed by the umbrella of social software include IM/chat, telephony (like Skype), wikis, social bookmarking (like del.icio.us), sharing networks (like flickr), blogs and social network services (like LinkedIn, friendster, etc.).

I argue that social network services potentially add the most value to online social networks.

1. Social network services, when built to maintain real-world networks, should serve as the backbone of online social networking. The Web has created thousands of touchpoints for us to collaborate and share data — yet, this so often occurs without any semblance of broader social ties. What happens when we meet an individual online? How can we immediately know how this person fits into our personal network? As the Web grows and evolves to effectively mirror our social networks in their entirety, I believe communication will become more efficient, more effective and more meaningful.

2. But how does communication become more meaningful when we’re simply replicating real-world networks in an online community? Right now the Web is missing a lot. It can’t recognize the formal/informal links between individuals. This is, of course, created from the bottom-up by users themselves, but our connections to others don’t spill out of the boxes created by social network services. Flock, the new “social” browser, is a step in this direction — but we have far to go. When our personal networks are totally integrated into our online experience, we’ll be able see who in our network is in a particular news story. We’ll be able to see which of our extended network has done things that we want to do, and we’ll be able to utilize our network to communicate more effectively with them.

3. It’s not easy to simply replicate our networks into an online community, though. The translation involves a carefully crafted community with the same “rules” as real-world networks. That’s why I think Facebook has been so popular with college students: it centers itself on strong and true common threads, one’s school. If I’m at Wake Forest I can only see profiles but can’t see the profile of an individual at Harvard. Only by mutually establishing a connection do I replicate my network, so it preserves an element of trust as well as accuracy.

Furthermore, does anyone really think that MySpace is an example of valuable and true networks? I’m sure there is some truth to the connections currently taking place on there, but there’s not level of verifiability except for a mutual agreement to “connect.” Other than that, there are really no rules. One can’t tell the importance of the connection: friend? colleague? random individual? Granted, this is a problem with Facebook and all other social networks, too. But there are formal rules in place.

I believe the next step of more efficient relationship-building and information-sharing online absolutely has to be bridging the gap between the two. Imagine how valuable decisions could be when, for example, we knew not only who was in a news story, but what their career accomplishments were, what their education was, to whom they’re connected or related, etc.

For Web-based anythings, it’s really tough to find a good name/domain name these days. I went through a lot of trouble finding a name that

1. Had something to do with the product

2. Could be easily spelled

3. Was catchy/memorable and could be used as a verb

Not only is there a huge market for domain names, with people and businesses snatching them up like hotcakes, but they’re also cheap. And when something is cheap — especially when it can have a huge value in the future — people will buy lots of it.

Verisign, in their August 2005 report, the number of domain names reached 82.9M with over 8M names being registered in Q2 2005. This is a 63% increase year-over-year!

Moreover, 12% of domain names are simply parked and not in use. That’s about 10M domain names not being used.

I ran into this situation quite frequently — a great name not being used but simply parked. Sometimes these sites were parked for over a year.

Chances are, these names are parked for secondary sales. According to sedo (which, because of the nature of its business, could have somewhat biased information), the

average sales price for a domain name was $36,387 and the median sales price was $5,000. In terms of trading activity, the corresponding percentages came in at 6 percent for names over $100,000, 48 percent for names between $5,000 and $100,000, and 46 percent for those under $5000.

So, this tells us that there are a few sites pulling up the average price of a secondary domain sale.

But still, $5,000 for a domain name is a HUGE ROI. If someone bought a domain name at GoDaddy for 7 bucks, that’s over a 7,000% return!

I’m happy to report, though, that, in the end, I did find a satisfactory domain that meets all of the above requirements.

It’s called Tripolit (and yes, I did park it, and yes, I do plan on acftually developing it.)

More soon.

One of my favorite magazines — Inc. — has published 75 reasons why it’s good to be an American entrerpeneur right now.

Some highlights:

Number 15 Because you can build a team, your team, at a time when creating communities that nurture and sustain us may be more important than ever before.

Number 23 Because big companies still keep Dilbert in fresh material.

Number 25 Because we’re not rookies anymore. In 25 years of entrepreneurial expansion we’ve learned that it’s possible to be a long-haul entrepreneur with a balanced life, not just an unhealthy, self-sacrificing sprinter.

Number 27 The broadbanded, Wi-Fied, video-enabled, international-boundary-eradicating, cost-reducing, market-expanding, ever-stereophonic, and cyber-educating Internet.

Number 33 Because no one is against “the ownership society” anymore. Republican or Democrat, right wing or left, the term has become just a part of the language–and now everyone in government feels pressure to get behind it. Putting everyone, from all sides, on the side that’s yours.

Number 63 Because fortune favors the brave–more than ever. In the words of serial company founder and strategic planning consultant Lanny Goodman, of Management Technologies in Albuquerque: “The risk of making bold moves is less than it’s ever been. The traditional risk-reward equation has flipped. It’s maintaining the status quo that’s dangerous now. Strategy, products, services, organization design, whatever–it’s not breaking the mold, not adapting to new opportunities, that will hurt you. Think about it: We’ve been running our companies with a set of assumptions and tools that are a hundred years old. They were developed by some very bright and capable people, but it was a time when capital was scarce and expensive and talent was plentiful and cheap. Today just the opposite is true–and the old tools don’t work anymore. Doing almost anything that breaks the legacy of ‘check your brain at the door and do what we tell you to do’ is likely to be an improvement. And is there anyone better positioned to break that legacy than an entrepreneur?”