What Blink Thinks.

Toobla, built right here in Columbus, is now open to the public.  Toobla is growing at Internet speed, but needs your help. Please create an account here: http://toobla.com/signup and if you can, Digg our latest press story here: http://digg.com/d3160eq

What Is Toobla?

Toobla collects your favorite content from the web in visual folders that are very simple to use and easy to share — a centralized, visual repository for everything and anything you find online. Toobla is a single place to collect and organize your favorite web finds and the only tool on the Internet that lets you pull together collections of your favorite content in portable containers, including websites, documents, videos, images or widgets of any kind.

A major departure from old bookmarking services that typically send you away, Toobla lets you play and interact with the stuff you’ve collected inside your very own, custom made Toobla folders. When you visit a folder on Toobla, you can enjoy all the content within it right then and there.

For example, this “Radiohead” folder on Toobla (http://toob.la/b39) holds a YouTube music video, a Flickr concert photo, the band’s official website and a streaming music player — all packaged together in one tidy spot.

Your favorite folders are your own online personal library and are beautifully displayed in one central place. There, anyone can experience and discover the media that you’ve collected. TechCrunch recently called Toobla a “portable visual locker for the web”… and thatʼs exactly what it is.

Toobla is reinventing the bookmarking space. Most all of the currently available bookmarking sites are boring. We strived to create a bookmarking service that’s beautiful and fun to browse — like an iTunes for web content. We’ve made Toobla so you can not only have a great place to come back and enjoy your own content but so you can also more easily share your favorite stuff online.

Bookmarking with Toobla

The Toobla bookmarklet tool makes it easy to import web content into your folders while browsing the web. Toobla can also automatically collect your favorite things from popular Web 2.0 sites. For example, if you use Digg, bookmark on Delicious, or import a video to Youtube, we will automatically give your content a thumbnail and save it in a Toobla folder for you. Toobla will soon integrate with more sites including Twitter, WordPress, and Flickr.

Sharing Your Toobla Folders

Toobla folders are also easily shared. You can email a link, post a short-url directly to Twitter, embed as a widget on a blog, or post to your Facebook newsfeed. Toobla’s integration with popular social networks like Facebook creates the ultimate form of self expression, the ultimate canvas to share the online things you love.

Popular Toobla folders (http://toobla.com/popular) can also be easily added to your own Toobla library with a single click. Current popular folders include: “SNL Digital Shorts”, “Social Media Documents”, “Classic Video Games” and great entrepreneurial content in folders “Guy Kawasaki” and “Entrepreneurship”. Anyone can create and share Toobla folders on just about anything.

You shouldn’t have to think about where you found something or have to go search again every time you want to show someone something. It’s just there… it’s in your Toobla library!

Toobla is Brian Link (CEO), Jake Saxbe (Founder), Matt Yoho (Lead Developer), Mike Busch (Developer), Tony Schneider (Intern), and Apurva Patel (Intern).  We welcome your feedback and would love to hear what you love and hate about Toobla so that we might improve the site.

You know that scene where Tyler stops at a convenience store and takes the guy out back and holds a gun to his head? Awesome, right? Fight Club is quite possibly my favorite movie ever. This is probably the scene I quote from the least, but it may be the most profound. For me, it’s all about *why* he does it.

He asks Raymond K. Hessel, “What did you want to be?” and eventually Ray responds that he wanted to be a veterinarian. So Tyler Durden takes his driver’s license and tells him that if he’s not going back to school or somehow changing his life so that he’s on his way to being a veterinarian in six weeks that he’s going to be dead.

Remember, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”. We really do only have so much time to live. As morbid as that sounds, it helps to think about that once in a while. You may look back at what you’re doing right now as that time your life stalled for 5 years while you waited for something to happen.

But if you become your own Tyler Durden and put a gun to your own head and really think about what you want to do, it could change everything. Jack, who witnessed the gun to the head scene says “I feel sick,” to which Tyler responds “Imagine how he feels. Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.”

I’ve been thinking about this concept lately. How my own life has evolved to where I am, and how utterly insane my weeks sometimes feel. It’s almost 3AM on a Friday night, and I’ve just spent a few hours testing and logging bugs for our website, Toobla.com. Next week I need to work on putting three pitch decks together, one to find more money for Toobla – my day job at which I’m CEO – and two for start-ups I’m working with on the side with my web accelerator/incubator company, weBuild. Toobla is literally jumping through hoops to secure one or two months of funding at a time from now to February. I work an awful lot of hours every week in order to keep everything I’m juggling up in the air.

But, as crazy as it may sound – not knowing if I’ll have a job in two months and blindly putting my faith in Internet startups and in my ability and my teams’ abilities to create successful products and solutions – I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. And it occurred to me, as I’ve been mulling this Tyler Durden scene around in my head, that it wasn’t really just one event that brought me here. There have been a number of decisions I’ve made since October last year when I left Digg that have guided and evolved me to where I am. Those decisions weren’t part of a master plan per se, but they were entirely about me following my passions.

The most important advice I could give an entrepreneur is to passionately pursue their dreams. Go boldly. Be confident. Surround yourself with excellent and talented people, but go all out – no regrets, as mightily as you can.

But you have to put the gun to your head first and ask that question.

So, what is it that *you’re* passionate enough about to risk everything?

So yesterday, I asked a good friend of mine, Jeff Brown of the DigitalDept (@digitaldept), for a stack of his business cards to help hand out to the various small businesses I run across in Columbus.  He’s fantastic with anything and everything to do with digital media for marketing by the way (everything including logo designs and digital branding, posters, mailers, newsletters, twitter backgrounds, high quality inexpensive business cards, you name it).

Then today, I was doing some searching for Twitter tools that help you figure out who you’re following that’s not following you, and got lost in a zillion search results about this topic and bloggers talking about strategies about who you should follow back and all kinds of discussions about your Twitter counts.  You’ve all seen it.  It’s like a big contest for people, isn’t it?  It really makes me wonder why.  I mean I understand the purile popularity contest that social media ignites in people, but for those that are treating it seriously and trying to leverage social media to grow their business and do something strategic with their marketing… why would you care?

So I ask this question: would you (and do you) trust every stranger you meet to hand out your business cards for you?  I hope your answer is no.  Your brand is something you need to value.  And while you *do* want as much exposure as you can get and are right in trying to find the right way to use social media to extend your capabilities and reach, you need to be cautious here.  There are only a few trusted friends and business partners that I would ask to hand out my business cards for me.  

So what am I getting at?  Well, why do you think most people try to accumulate followers on Twitter?  I think that *they* think that they’re increasing their ability to spread the word about whatever they’re tweeting – spreading news about their company, bragging about blog entries, sharing information they find. But random followers, meaning people you’ve not done business with or don’t know much about beyond their profile data are really just strangers, aren’t they?  And I purport that asking these strangers to retweet your messages about your company is exactly the same as asking strangers to hand out business cards.  

Now this is social media and it’s a whole new world, I realize.  And getting more exposure whether it’s through trusted partners or random @strangeguyyoujustmet can actually put your brand in front of more eyeballs in some cases.  But I’m suggesting you think about your strategy and whether this feels like giving a stack of business cards to strangers or not.  Maybe it doesn’t bother you

What do you think?

My new consulting website http://beinteractiveconsulting.com/ is up.  After nearly five months on my own it felt like it was time  With so much to do – the simplest and most obvious things can fall off your plate too!  But now I have something I can point people to when they ask “what do you do?”

But what’s funny to me is that every other “social media consultant” I see out there hasn’t bothered to set up a website.  I guess that’s the point they’re making though, isn’t it?  If you’re engrossed in social media, maybe that’s all you need – your blog.  After all, what you’re selling is your point of view and best practices (and hopefully your experience). Ahhh… that’s the catch though isn’t it?  Ever see a social media consultant sell themselves based on their experience?  It’s interesting, not many people actually have experience in this field yet do they?  The ones that have great experience are too busy to sit around and brag about it – they’re off speaking at big conferences between client gigs.

So I guess I’m trying to do something a little different.  My goal is to create an even playing field and disrupt this new industry.  There’s just too many people out there (large and small businesses alike) that need the detailed “social media starter kit” and quite honestly, the information is out there already and free, you just have to dedicate some time to scour a few dozen blogs and then be daring enough to give it a try.  It’s really not rocket science.  So keep your eyes peeled, I’m going to launch something as soon as I can that aims to practically give away a big concentrated dose of this best practices stuff – the baseline that all the crazy social media people in the echo chamber take for granted.  Information wants to be free, right?

Why would I do that?  I mean, I could hang up a sign and rake in some serious cash helping people setup twitter accounts and learn how to use LinkedIn and Facebook to promote their business right? My passion is working with businesses on achieving radical change and driving strategic goals through an organization and instilling a culture that breeds success.  To do this well though, it means those that don’t know this baseline of knowledge need to get up to speed first. So, we’ll see.  Worst case scenario, this thing I’m going to launch will save a lot of people a lot of time sifting through the blogosphere of social media.  Shoot me an email if you’d like an early sneak peek as I get closer to launch.

Meanwhile, social media isn’t the only thing I do.  And if I can be blunt, a good social media consultant will have a background to draw from and deep experience in business strategy consulting, marketing, technology and some hands-on Internet work too.  So there’s my pitch.  I’ll let you read my new site if you’re interested in what my other services are: http://beinteractiveconsulting.com/

And if you know someone that might be interested in what I do, please forward them my links.  And then let me know – I’d be happy to reward you with a kick ass referral bonus.

Brian

To be sure, Twitter is a tool with many usage patterns. There are people doing any number of things: making connections, wasting time, building businesses, crafting their digital personality, hubristic chattery (that’s a good domain name waiting to happen), or just learning and sharing to name a few.

I find that usually I’m lazy. Or unfocused is perhaps a better term. And while my intentions are great, I’m not always using Twitter in the noble way that I say that I am. What I like to say is that I’m listening to and learning from social media experts, agile process experts, and the VCs and Angel private equity experts. And when I’m totally on it, I’m bookmarking great links and posting them to delicious and even giving back great content I find on the web in return.

And sometimes I do actually do that. But the reality is, I’m often too busy to make the effort, so I’m dorking around on Twitter just like I do on the Internet when I’m not focused. It can be a fun distraction to let your brain go mush for a while (like Alec Baldwin describes in the Hulu commercial).

But what I will say is that even though I’m not always playing my A game and interacting on Twitter, I do like to pride myself on being selective about who I follow and who I listen to. And even in my off-weeks, I’m at least pulling it up at stop lights and whenever I have 30 seconds to dive in and read a few things. Right now, my favorited links are accumulating like the same uncontrollable pile of papers on my desk and I keep thinking “I really should get to that soon”. Because I favorite a tweet with a link that I want to come back and read, digest and perhaps post to delicious, or if it’s really good on my blog.

But alas, my social networking time suffers when I get busy. And so it goes. Maybe next week I’ll attack that pile of papers. The firehose keeps it coming, how do you cope with it?

Tonight more than 100 people came out to Ignite Columbus.  What a great event… the space at Lextant was perfect (so was the pizza and beer – thanks EdgeCase).  You always learn something completely unexpected at an Ignite.  When Alvin and friends have uploaded the videos and presentations I’ll post a link to them here.  In the meantime, here’s the deck I delivered on Agile Software Processes.  It’s posted in my Docs and Papers section too.

I look forward to the next one.