Over the weekend I noticed a link to a nearly 16-year-old New York Times article appearing over and over in my Twitter feed. The piece, written by Saul Hansell and published June 9, 1998, is titled "America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million." In fact, the piece gained so much Twitter momentum that it turned up in the top 10 on The Latest, "an automatic list of the latest and greatest links from Twitter," by Saturday afternoon. (Background on The Latest here, courtesy of my colleagues at Creativity). Then I found a whole discussion about it on Hacker News, with more than 100 comments, also on Saturday.Hansell reported back in 1998 that ICQ, the instant-messaging service that AOL had just bought, was an attractive acquisition target "because it appeals to a much younger and more technologically sophisticated audience than the mainstream America Online brand." And also because of high engagement: "ICQ users spend an average of 75 minutes a day on the service, compared with fewer than 10 minutes a day for highly touted search and directory services such as Yahoo and Lycos," Hansell paraphrased AOL's then-president Robert Pittman as saying.Sound familiar? Of course it does. Fast-forward 16 years to Facebook's deal to buy WhatsApp, for similar reasons. (I did the math: Facebook founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 14 years old when AOL bought ICQ. Was he paying attention at the time?) Continue reading at AdAge.com Continue reading at 'Advertising Age'
[ Advertising Age | 2014-02-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
Over the weekend I noticed a link to a nearly 16-year-old New York Times article appearing over and over in my Twitter feed. The piece, written by Saul Hansell and published June 9, 1998, is titled "America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million." In fact, the piece gained so much... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2014-02-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Most startups will never see anything close to the amount of money Twitter plans on raising during its IPO this week (a reported $1.6 billion) and in fact, three out of four tech businesses fail. Entrepreneurs in training looking to create a successful company, then, might want to know what... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-11-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
What does it take to sell a new edition of a national dictionary? In Australia, one publisher is hoping a year-long guerilla marketing campaign and the birth of a word will be enough.Over the past year, McCann Melbourne has quietly been seeding a new word across the world-"phubbing." It's a term... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2013-10-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
While I was doing reporting for this big story about GitHub, a side discussion came up with Scott Chacon, one of GitHub’s founders and the tsar of their new office, known to GitHubbers as Office 3.0. As we talked about the architecture of the new space, a “blank slate” industrial building where... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-07-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this