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Bre.ad: half baked, and maybe already toast.

by alec on June 19, 2011

Bre.ad, the new link shortener promoted used by Lady Gaga, is a bad idea.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the quick recap of bre.ad is as follows:

  1. Shorten links by simply navigating to http://bre.ad/{your URL}.  It’s a little easier and simpler than visiting the bit.ly or ow.ly site.
  2. When visitors click on your bre.ad link, a “toast” created by you is shown for 5 seconds before the link it refers to is shown.   You can create an inventory of toasts that promote your own favorite sites or URLs, and each time you share a link, you advertise another site.

Try it by clicking this bre.ad generated short link.  It will show you a toast I created from my about.me profile, and then link you to back to the home page for this site: http://bre.ad/082tnk

So why don’t I like it?

Bre.ad will likely sell part of the inventory of “toasts” that they maintain to third parties. Their privacy policy explicitly says “Bread may use some of the information collected in order to customize the advertisements to your interests and preferences.” They also have a liberal cookie policy, collecting information about who clicks on each and every link (not just toasts) generated by their system.  Their terms of service require you to register for the site, and give them the demographic info they need to target you.

Bre.ad haven’t said what they intend to do with this information.  However, the information they’re collecting, when combined with their technology, enables a plague of interstitial ads to be generated during ordinary content navigation.

I’m not sure bre.ad is going to succeed in any case.  Social sharing is now the norm.  What web site doesn’t have a “tweet this” or “share on facebook” button on each page already? URL shorteners are now so ubiquitous that it’s actually more work to create a bre.ad link than other ways.  In order to succeed, bre.ad needs to become embedded in those sites, rather than focus on consumers.

Bre.ad:  a half-baked idea? burnt toast? (rim-shot, please!)

CLARIFICATION: I received a note from Alan Chan, Bre.ad founder and CEO, clarifying exactly the relationship that Lady Gaga has with Bre.ad.  Alan’s note read, in part “Both Lady Gaga and 50 Cent are early adopters who have been known to send out Bre.ad links, but neither individual is an investor, endorser, supporter or a backer of our company.”  Thanks for making that clear, Alan.

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The Twitter Trap and the “AOL-ization” of the New York Times

by alec on May 19, 2011

For a couple of years now part of my morning routine has been coffee, news, and sharing interesting articles I find on my twitter feed.  It’s good for the content creators, and a good way to start a conversation with people who share interests similar to mine.

In the beginning I built a complicated system that fed into my Delicious.com account, and then forwarded on to twitter, facebook, and other social media that I use. More recently, I haven’t needed that.  Web sites everywhere are now deploying “tweet this” buttons, which makes sharing dead simple. 

imageThe New York Times, unfortunately, seems bent on a return to 1995. Once-upon-a-time the Times let people freely read and share their online content.  Recently, however, they’ve erected a pay-wall, and now they’ve even erected a “share-wall”.  You see, although you can share their content using the twitter button on their site, you have to actually create a NY Times account, and log-in before doing so. 

Like I said – bent on a return to 1995.  It’s the “AOL-ization” of the New York Times.

(The article I was trying to share was The Twitter Trap.  Worth a read.)

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Hurricane Earl doesn’t have to ruin your day!

September 1, 2010
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Hurricane Earl is already doing damage to people’s productivity.  Just check out the trending topics on Twitter.  Conversation about Earl is hitting a high, as the Twitterati focus in on this new distraction. Fortunately, even if Earl does touch down on Thursday as some are predicting, it doesn’t have to impede your productivity. Natural disasters [...]

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Browse the web socially with Qwisk

November 21, 2009

Qwisk is a new social browsing tool that launched yesterday at the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp.  Qwisk lets you quickly and easily share content with your social networks (Twitter and Facebook supported, plus the Qwisk network).  It inserts a messaging pane on the left side of your screen to give you access to your social networks [...]

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Mike Arrington’s risk calculation

July 15, 2009

Over at TechCrunch Mike Arrington has had a mass of over 310 documents internal to Twitter show up in his inbox.  He’s planning on publishing some, but not all, as the bulk are uninteresting, and perhaps maybe embarrassing to some people, including senior industry folks that Twitter has been trying to recruit. There has been [...]

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How did you spend your weekend? #iranelection

June 22, 2009

I spent much of my weekend glued to the Internet, transfixed by the images and words coming from Iran.  Unable to keep up with the flow coming from Twitter, I turned to Andrew Sullivan’s excellent Daily Dish, where he has published a digest of the more reliable Twitter sources, as well as videos and commentary [...]

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Who is Komrade @Mashikov?

June 7, 2009

You may have seen a couple of posts over the past week grumbling about the new Twitter game Spymaster.  I called it dull, and questioned the game play.  Thursday night, however, I recognized that there was a great opportunity to have some fun with a role play.  So I invented cold warrior Komrade Mashikov, the [...]

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“#spymaster is so last friday.”

June 2, 2009

Spymaster took off like a rocket over this past weekend.  A little bit of hype, plus the desire to be playing with the cool new thing, and boom… you’ve got an instant hit. There was a dark side, however, in the way that it used Twitter to communicate with users and recruit others to the [...]

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Spymaster has a problem. It’s dull.

May 31, 2009

Friday, Spymaster debuted on Twitter.  At this point in time, according to bit.ly, nearly 200,000 people have signed up.  Spymaster is turning into Twitter’s first viral social game.  I saw my first invite yesterday morning.  Happily, I haven’t been deluged as some folks have.  However, the application is very chatty, as many folks have complained.  [...]

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Build an audience with MyTwitterButler

May 19, 2009

Wondering how to build an audience on Twitter? Over the weekend I added hundreds of new followers using a handy application called MyTwitterButler. This little tool filters tweets based on keywords you supply, and then automatically follows people who meet your criteria.  Let’s say, for example that you’re interested in Formula One racing.  You could [...]

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