Tello: Techsmooth or Techcrunchy?
On Techcrunch, A-list blogger Michael Arrington posted a seemingly innocuous commentary on Tello, a high-profile foray into the instant messaging/presence space. While praising the underlying idea, he pointed out a few flaws in the way the launch has been orchestrated, including the fact that the Tello homepage trumpeted links from the traditional press but ignored the blogging world.
Nothing particularly controversial, one would think, but this didn’t prevent Michael from being raked over the coals in the comments to his post, with a typical critique reading:
I generally like your blog, but shudder when you stray into pretentious rants like this. Please do criticize on the basis of the product but don’t whine because a company isn’t following your narrow script.
Now maybe there’s some history here that I don’t know about, but there seems to be a surprising amount of pent-up hostility towards bloggers like Michael who have the temerity to believe that what they say actually matters. Another commenter points out that even exceptionally popular bloggers have far less reach than a mainstream mag like Business Week.
True enough, but this totally and utterly misses the point. It’s a well-known fact that successful names from Big Business aren’t always the best entrepreneurs. Seeing as Tello encroaches on the terrain of tech favorites like Skype and Trillian, a very pertinent question to ask is whether they will successfully court the requisite early adopters and opinion leaders. If not, all their money, experience and exposure in the mainstream media may well come to naught. Michael was absolutely right to criticize their apparently blasé attitude towards bloggers, and Tello was absolutely right to respond by adding links to major blogs to their news page. The only ones for whom I can’t find any sympathy are those righteously indignant readers of Techcrunch who live and breathe the Web 2.0 world, but as far as I can tell don’t even get blogging.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
