Beaconhill NW

Last week, Robert Scoble of building43 stopped by Box HQ for a chat with CEO/Co-founder Aaron Levie and VP of Marketing Jen Grant. They talked about the new content viewing and embedding features we recently introduced, where Box is headed with Cloud Content Management, and how Box’s open platform has brought key integrations with business applications like Salesforce.com and a growing variety of mobile apps to Box customers.

A Thursday update to Seesmic for BlackBerry fills in some big coverage holes missing from Seesmic’s proficient desktop tweeter for Windows and Mac. It may be time for those heavy Twitter users among you to get Seesmic back on your radar, if not on your BlackBerry.

Retweeting is Seesmic’s main addition in the latest release, where the retweet funtionality pops up into the options menu. Retweeting quickly reposts another user’s 140 characters as is. For more creative control, there’s also Quote, which will let you edit a tweet–even adding geolocation, a short URL, and a photo–to the message before sending. Like Ubertwitter, Seesmic for Blackberry now includes a preview of a picture embedded within an opened tweet. Good. Now you can slake your curiosity without having to leave the app or wait for a full-size image to load in the browser. The same goes for links leading to Google maps.

[ht to cnet]

Last night I had a dream that I was visited by the online ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come…

Unfortunately, social media and blogging was so new that the Marley brothers were asking me questions about whether there was an app they could use to update their statuses while in the afterlife…

The Ghost of Online Past…

The ghost  of the past took me to Christmas last year at my in-law’s house.

ME:”Don’t you have anything older than this?”

GCP:”I’m here to take you back to when you started building your online prescence”

I was shown how I sat for hours on my laptop while the rest of the family played cards, watched movies, and spent time together.

The Ghost of the Online Present…

The Ghost of the Online Present took me on a blog tour…We ended up on a post on Michael Hyatt’s blog about the perfect moment…but Michael’s blog was getting an overhaul and we couldn’t read any of the posts.

The Ghost of Online Yet-To-Come

This ghost was still in beta and had a lot of bugs.  He had no idea what to show me.  We ended up over at John Saddington’s blog and read “Personal Web and Technology Goals for 2010″

NOTE: I’m a changed man.  I’m leaving the laptop and the Blackberry at home tonight while we spend two nights at the in-laws.

Merry Christmas to you all.

These are 7 questions that have been keeping me up at night since I read them this weekend on Chris Brogan’s blog:

What are the basic, bare-bones components of our business? – Use small words. Describe it as briefly as you can. No matter if you THINK you know the business, try it again.

How do we share? – Inside the business, outside the business, it’s important to figure this out. Think broadly about “share.” With social tools, there are lots of implications, but inside the company, it’s crazy and potentially bit.

How do we collaborate? – Similar but different to sharing, the question is: now that we have these amazing tools, how do we best apply them to collaborative efforts: business-to-customer, customer-to-customer, business-to-business, etc. The last of these, business-to-business, is harder than you think. Do you dare open your company up for external collaboration? Software companies do it all the time. Would it work for you?

How do we wire new networks? – Let’s accept that social software like Facebook and Twitter are part of what’s next. How do we tap these in concerted ways? How do we build interactivity for our own business purposes into these tools? And here’s one: what would happen if one of them went away? Do you have a plan b?

How do we make new distribution points? – I have a new favorite thing to say at conferences with regards to distribution: Walmart and the Mafia are both masters of it. In both cases, they learned how to bypass prior roadblocks, they learned how to shift materials faster into buyers’ hands. They know how to distinguish between buyers and non-buyers. Do you? And are you expanding your distribution? Are you jumping gates?

How do we develop relationships that yield? – It’s great to have 100,000 friends on Twitter. How many take action? Of the 36,000 folks who subscribe to my blog, I usually get between 50-100 comments per post. That’s less than 1/3 of 1%. If comments were my business, I’d say that stinks. Relationships that yield are how we separate “friends” or “community members” from “customers” in our various business buckets. They overlap, but for the sake of this question, think strongly about “yield” and what it means to you.

Where is that yield and how do we extract value? – You’ll note that I don’t ask you for much in the way of money. I like to ask big companies for it. You? I like to give things away for free, because it’s also a strong way to advertise what I know, because I want you to succeed, etc. But somewhere along the line, baby needs to eat. Where do you extract value from your efforts? (This one is particularly tricky and important.)

LinkedIn has always been about helping you to build your professional identity on the web. The many elements that make up your online professional brand range from your LinkedIn profile to the many professional conversations you’re a part of. Status has proved valuable to our users, from finding new assignments and jobs to kick-starting a global business enterprise.

Now you can amplify those messages by broadcasting them to your audience on Twitter.

Want to know how to connect Twitter and Linkedin? Go to the Linkedin blog to find out.

According to Mashable:
“an attempt to re-imagine web-based communication for the modern era from the ground up. Raindrop will also borrow some elements from Wave like the ability to view images and videos inline, and it will be interesting to see what other parallels might emerge between the two.”

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.