Very good article about a formula that actually lets you determine whether a freemium or paid model is right for your business.

With this in mind, Mullany’s equation for freemium businesses looks like this:

Price Paid by Premium User – Cost of Proving the Service to the Premium User – [ (1/Ratio of Premium:Free Users) * (Cost of Free Service Per User + Cost of Marketing to get a Free User) ] = Profit Per Premium User

Check out the full article over here.

This video is mind-blowing and amazing. It describes how one might visualize ten dimensions.

Found on this website via @ryanjunee.

Twitter’s been a media darling for a while now, as nearly everyone speculates on which direction they’re headed as a company and how they are planning to make money. One of the most public, and most audacious, speculations about future business models was the recent TechCrunch debacle over Twitter secrets leaked by a hacker.

Be that as it may, Twitter just launched a redesigned homepage a few minutes ago, and it features search and topic trending front and center.  As I just tweeted, if there was any doubt about the direction Twitter might be headed as a company, I think the new design clears that right up.

Regular Twitter watchers should not find this surprising. Frankly, I think it makes a ton of sense. Real-time search is the new black here Silicon Valley, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to do something interesting in this space. Of course, the challenges are still great, because simply searching what people are saying or doing in real time doesn’t solve the problem of relevance, context or accuracy.

I’ve long been interested in both social search (e.g. mining one’s network for data) and real-time search, and I’m really excited to see what Twitter has up its sleeves.

P.S. Perhaps fittingly, it was launched on @Ev and @Sara’s anniversary. Hooray for new beginnings!

As you might guess from the fact that I’m @peter on Twitter, I was a pretty early adopter. In fact, I signed up almost immediately after the service went live. For the past three years I’ve enjoyed using the service, and it’s been fascinating to see its evolution.

Imagine my surprise, then, when nine days ago I woke up to discover that Twitter had suspended my account. I received no notice from them, and there was no apparent reason for the suspension. I’ve only ever evangelized Twitter to all my friends, and I’ve never done anything shady, so I figured the suspension must have been an accident.

Now, I know some people who work at Twitter, and even a few of their investors. But I also know the Twitter people are busy folks, so I didn’t try to get special treatment, but instead followed the advice on their site and submited a support ticket, alerting them to the fact that I was accidentally suspended.

Well, no sooner had I submitted that support ticket and refreshed the page than the ticket was marked “solved”. But my account was still suspended! No response, no explanation, and no solution – they just auto-closed my ticket.

So I reopened the ticket with a puzzled reply, and started to wait.

Three days later I still hadn’t heard a thing, so I emailed suspended@twitter.com to explain my situation. And I waited some more.

The next day I got a reply from Twitter saying that a bunch of accounts had recently been suspended, but that they should now be back to normal. Unfortunately, my account was still suspended. So I replied again, and waited…

Fast forward to today (9 days later). Still not a peep from Twitter. Fortunately, though, they’re located in SF, and I happened to be near their office, so I popped in to visit my friends there. I explained my situation, and my kind friend took pity on me and chatted with the support folks. Soon after I left the Twitter office, my account was reinstated. Hooray!

Sort of…

I’m finally back in the twitterverse, but now I have a new problem: none of the people I follow show up in my timeline. But if I unfollow and “re-follow” someone, they start showing up. I’m hoping the problem will fix itself, since I really, really don’t want to have to re-add all 490 people whom I was following before.

(sigh)

I like Twitter. I’ve always seen its usefulness and have evangelized it to friends who often scoffed as I sang its praises. As one of its very first users I’ve been through a lot with it – chronic down time, beloved features that have come and gone, user backlash, “Oprah-fication”. I’m still a fan, but there definitely comes a point when it starts to lose some of its luster.

This recent suspension, being so random, unexplained and unnecessary, definitely took the shine off of Twitter for me. And while I’m sure the good people in the support department are inundated and overworked, I’ve had nothing but horrible experiences with Twitter’s customer service. This was not my first time submitting a help ticket. Two previous, unrelated help requests were never even answered and still remain unsolved months later.

I understand that Twitter’s still a free service and expectations should be adjusted accordingly, but when you alienate your user base – especially early adopters and evangelists, that’s never a good thing. I’m crossing my fingers that maybe something will change for the better. But honestly, I don’t have high hopes, and that makes me sad.

[update: major thanks to my friend, Helga, without whom I might just have gone insane. Thank you!]

Earlier today Yelp! sent out their weekly email newsletter with the following headline: “Put the fun between your legs”. A little suggestive, certainly, but it was the next line that really made me do a double-take: “This Weekly Yelp brought to you by SF Women Against Rape”

Since my blogging is so infrequent, mostly due to the fact that it’s a little tedious posting short missives and links, I’ve started a Posterous account. You can find my posts over here.

I will still continue to blog in this space from time to time; in fact, I’m working on a post right now. But this space will be mostly reserved for more substantive and/or thoughtful posts, whereas my Posterous account will be for the fun, quick, easily consumed bits of info.

You really couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. The Associated Press is well on its way to becoming the RIAA of the news industry. Their latest stunt involves one of their VPs sending a cease and desist letter to a Tennessee radio station (WTNQ), asking them to remove an AP video they had embedded on WTNQ’s website from YouTube.

The source of the YouTube video content? None other than the AP’s own YouTube channel.

That’s right – the AP’s right hand doesn’t even know what it’s left hand is doing. I guess no one told their legal department that they actually have their own YouTube channel on which embedding is turned on… you know, to help videos spread virally across the web.

As funny as this all is, I mostly just find it frightening and depressing. That the Associated Press is so completely clueless when it comes to new media and how the Internet works is not a good sign. And draconian crackdown efforts which backfire so completely and publicly do way more harm than any embedded YouTube video ever could.

This guy created an incredible original composition from a number of different YouTube songs & videos. If this doesn’t make a strong case in favor of Creative Commons, I don’t know what does.

Probably the greatest snack food creation I have ever seen in my entire life. Guacamole, salsa, a pound of bacon, and a pile of Twinkies… just to name some of the ingredients.

via Anne Hubert. Originally posted on Holy Taco.

Woman auctions her virginity for $3.8 million (and counting) (CNN.com)

Zappos CEO on how to build a brand online without spending a fortune on ads (BrandWeek)

37 Signals has a creative way to reduce credit card chargebacks – via @superamit