February 2010 - Creative Department Blog

Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity

Posted
February 28, 2010
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Seeds of Inspiration
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When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down. Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. So the conversation stops.

About Sean Biehle

I’m a Taurus who enjoys rainy Sunday afternoons, open source technology, and unicorns.

Mayor of the North Pole

Posted
February 27, 2010
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Seeds of Inspiration
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"Foursquare is going to have some massive authentication issues to deal with if they are going to grow larger than their current size." Jim Bumgardner games Foursquare by checking into places across the globe using a simple script. His "cheating" exposes the inherent flaw that is present in many of the location-aware apps. (My brother in Seattle, regularly checks into my St. Louis brother's house.)

About Sean Biehle

I’m a Taurus who enjoys rainy Sunday afternoons, open source technology, and unicorns.

The Magic Numbers of Agency Growth

Posted
February 26, 2010
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Part of the challenge is that agency growth usually takes you by surprise. It's seldom a straight upward curve with a steady rate of growth every year. It's more like sharp spikes followed by plateaus. Success breeds success. One win leads to another. When you're six people, a new account may double the size of the agency. Now you need more space. Before you know it, you've got a hungry beast to feed. Each successive jump gets harder to make as the number of employees increase, and the revenue gets bigger.