YPulse Drops Hard Knocks from the New School

The Totally Wired "New School" consists of web 2.0 movers and shakers, many of which aren't much older than me. (Think Zuckerberg - except he's not here.) Check out the details here, under "The New School."

Generally speaking, they make me ass-bitingly jealous. But onto the meat of things:

David Birnbaum of Takkle says the media partnerships your wee company develops are critical to its future. Don't just hunt down a big name to piggyback; you have to consider whether your brands are a logical fit.

To illustrate, he points to his company's relationship with Sports Illustrated, the magazine you read when you're into sports but too young to buy Raider Girl calendars yet.

Takkle videos are highlighted within the magazine. Sports Illustrated ain't small-time, but that's beside the point: it shoots for the same demographic as Takkle, with the same strong sense of team-spiritedness and values. This kind of logical pairing is way more effective than just stapling yourself to a big-name brand and hoping to ride the wave.

A representative from Eat My Words later asked Birnbaum whether the misspelling of "Takkle" hurts the company's brand equity. Like a good sportsman he seemed to laugh in the face of such trivialities, pointing to Google (a misspelling of the mathematical "Googol") to demonstrate spelling isn't destiny.

Well, hrm. Misspelling a word like "tackle" and misspelling "Googol," where the misspelling is arguably easier to intuit than the formal word, are hardly comparable.

At this point Lance Tokuda of RockYou interjected with gusto. He pointed out that the majority of RockYou's users type the URL directly into the browser, and users that type in "RockU" are lost for the day - potentially forever.

Use standard English, he admonished, and make your name as easy as possible to spell.

A final word from RockYou: be open. Last year MySpace was adamant in its refusal to let other companies wreak havoc on its platform. But after Facebook opened its back-end to apps, which triggered a copycat reaction across the social networking world, MySpace is now following suit.

RockYou attributes most of its growth to the rapid adoption of its app on social networks. From inception it witnessed an interesting pattern: the site hovered at 20-40 uniques per day, growing in uneven increments until the end of their first month, when traffic hit 60,000 users and virtually shut down their site.

Oh yeah, that's another thing. Be careful what you wish for, the New School says. If you want a lot of users, make sure you're ready to support them.