1. The Real Lessons From Twitter (post) - Tony Stubblebine

2. StartupLessonsLearned (blog) - Eric Ries, cofounder of IMVU

3. Pearls Before Breakfast (post / video) - Gene Weingarten

4. What causes success? / The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters (post) - Marc Andreessen

5. How to develop your customers like you develop your product (post) - Venture Hacks

The features that mattered were defined by social interactions, and each user had their own customized set of features based on the social interactions that were important to them.

3.

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

4.

And so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?

5.

In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.

– Steve Blank

Therein lies the uneasy truth: In a major international crisis, one of the prime channels of communication and news for individuals, media outlets, and governments alike is a 2-year-old start-up in San Francisco with 50 employees, no discernible business model, a history of technical instability, and a misinformation-related lawsuit on the table. This is a problem.”

— Caroline McCarthy, CNET: With Iran crisis, Twitter’s youth is over (via mikehudack)

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

15 June 2009

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To an intuitive person, the steady stream of emotional input that Twitter delivers is appealing and energising. To an intuitive and introverted person, the mass download of emotional introspection is not only appealing, it is deeply comforting and reassuring. It provides a shared experience and a connection that introverted and intuitive people do not often get a chance to enjoy. And it’s there all the time, whenever you want to tap in.

- Danu Poyner

Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network.

- Steven Johnson (via)

Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and the host of real-time-web feed services … are quintessentially distraction-based media; shallow on context and truncated into staccato bursts of conversation. These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward… The dominant revenue model of the web today - the ad that urges a click - embeds distraction into interface design. The more clicks you take – the more Google makes in ad revenue (distraction pays).

- Joshua-Michéle: The Real Time Web is a Beautiful Distraction