Alex blogged about the casual development effort here at Big in Japan in three posts:
Check out the what, how and why about Egorcast. It was a fun little project mashingup Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress and Jott, hopefully you enjoyed it…

Nat Torkington wrote an interesting piece titled, "Six Basic Truths of Free APIs." He made six suggestions worthy of reprinting here:
Everyone (including us) seems to be creating fun gadgets and mash-ups using Twitter’s API. Here is a list from the unofficial Twitter wiki:
Our April ‘casual application’ (i.e. an application that can be built in less than a week) release is almost ready for primetime. We started coding the application on Friday and had our first release this evening (at DemoCampDallas2). It works for me, but it is not ready for primetime. Here is the scoop:
EgorCast™ is a simple web service designed to integrate the functionality of jott.com and social mo-blogging (mobile blogging) services such as Twitter.com and Jaiku.com. Jott allows users to dial a predetermined number and record a 15 second message. Jott then transcribes the message and emails the transcription to your phone or email account. EgorCast provides a gateway between the messages from Jott and social mo-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku (or both if you want). EgorCast will also send your messages to your WordPress blog with a specific category or tag.

I was reviewing a number of our previous projects (some more successful than others) and was reminded of a post from Joshua Porter titled, "Seven Reasons Why Web Apps Fail." Joshua wrote the post almost a year ago and I thought it was worth repeating the reasons. Check out the full post here.
The Big in Japan team has been working hard on community tools for the hit new FX Network show, The Riches. Turns out the show is a hit. Check out a preview:
Robert Scoble has some great advice to anyone considering delivering partial versus full feeds. Robert and I hate partial text feeds. Lots of folks think it helps click through if you offer a partial feed. Feedburner suggests they are wrong. Robert explains why partial feeds are a bad idea even if there was a a difference in click through:
The thing that partial texters are forgetting is that the other 900 people will find out about you from an influencer. Someone who will tell them. So, your traffic growth will be far slower if you only offer partial text feeds. Many of my friends who are journalists or bloggers just won’t deal with partial text feeds anymore. You certainly see that I link to mostly full text feeds on my link blog.
John Battelle realized this after he polled his readership about this issue: “From the results of my very unscientific poll, I’d clearly be alienating at least a very vocal minority.”
LEGO is one of Big in Japan’s most important social media clients. This 75 year-old toy maker is a great example of a company that has used social media to re-invent their business. Bill Tompson gave a great presentation at WOMBAT3 titled, "LEGO: Using Blogs to Speak With - Not At - Your Customers. Josh Hallett blogged about the presentation in a post of the same title. He explains,
They have an extraordinary community. LEGO fans make Star Trek fans look like lightweights. Recently LEGO embarked on a program to update the Mindstorms product. They asked their fans what they wanted and listened. The conversation loop is an ongoing process. They ask, listen, prioritize and respond, then start again. With tools like surveys, forums, blogs and profiling they learn about their customers. With their platform they can quickly gather feedback from customers on a variety of topics. Not only do the validate certain programs they also rate/rank them. Not only can they look at overall data, the can look across segments.
[photo credit: Josh Hallett of Hyku ~ our favorite social media guru]
Adam Darowski makes a great point suggesting that "the blog is the new resume." Adam is dead on with this one. Joshua Porter makes several good points including:
I have been blogging for a couple of years (Texas Startup Blog) and it has been a very interesting exercise. I have lost track of the number of job offers or inquires I have received as a direct result of my online writing. Adam explains:
Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch—to show they can “talk the talk” (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords). I can’t think of a reason for any serious tech professional to not have a blog. Not only does it serve as an excellent notebook for storing ideas and links, but it can come in handy in a job hunt where what interviewers really want to just know what, professionally (and somewhat personally), engages you on a day to day basis. How often do you look at a resume and wonder what exactly the person’s role on a project was? Well, if the person blogged about it then you would have a better idea—and you would know if the role would fit in with your team.
Good stuff…
We are playing with a new look for the Big in Japan website and blog, let us know what you think. The current design is beta as well as the internal pages (i.e. they are currently being written or rewritten). We figured we could wait until everything was perfect, but decided to open source our site development.
Have you ever seen a website and immediately came up with an idea to spoof it? In the past it just took too much time to launch a spoof site, but everything is different now. Ruby on Rails allowed our team to turn a joke into a website in just a few hours. Yesterday we had a laugh thinking how it would be funny if there was an ‘evil’ version of MyCyberTwin. After three hours Scott and Jeremy launched our ‘joke’ located at MyEvilCyberTwin.com. Want to chat with Evil Mike Arrington? Just click here. Oh, and if you want you can go ahead and create your own evil twin. Thanks to Mike for the inspiration.