Marketing Biz: DISQUS Builds Tunnels, Verbs Become Uniform & Groupon Serves Up Breadcrumb

It was a relatively quiet week in the world of marketing. Perhaps politics or the San Francisco Giants playoff run (#gogiants) is keeping people from churning out work.

There were some notable exceptions like the clever move DISQUS is making with their My Disqus product or Twitter’s pre-emptive purchase of Vine. Another Little Bird also made a splash, Groupon put the moves on OpenTable and Move itself was in an acquiring mood.

This is … Marketing Biz.

Evolving My Disqus

Today we’re announcing the first of a series of updates to the My Disqus tab. Disqus 2012 introduced My Disqus view as a more obvious way to see replies to your comments and follow updates from commenters you care about. It’s one of several features in Disqus 2012 that help users return to conversations and move across the network.

DISQUS has quietly been building a tunnel into thousands of websites and is now looking to take advantage of user context and be the aggregator and distributor of comments. They’ve built an engagement network into every DISQUS enabled site. Pretty brilliant if you ask me.

Peek launches with $1.4M from Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt to help you discover and book activities

The problem that Peek is trying to solve is that the different activity vendors generally tend to be small businesses with perhaps no strong web presence. It’s hoping that it’ll be the bridge between the customer and the small business.

At a glance Peek doesn’t seem that different, but the market here is inefficient and international. And there’s certainly a rising trend of users relying on online tools to help them explore their offline environment. Peek could be a more global version of Sōsh.

Another Top Yahoo Is Out The Door

A Yahoo spokesperson told us that Munshi left the company before Marissa Mayer was appointed CEO in July, and the company has not filled the position.

It’s not that surprising that Yahoo! is a revolving door of executives. The fact that the CTO position remains unfilled does make me wonder though. Perhaps the structure and culture needs to change enough so that any CTO hired can have an impact on the flailing organization.

Move Acquires Relocation.com

This deal is another step toward our goal of creating a one-stop destination for the industry’s most comprehensive and accurate real estate listings, as well as providing services like moving and storage that make the real estate process easier and more convenient for consumers.

The real estate vertical is intensely competitive so it’s not surprising that these types of acquisitions and roll-ups are happening. Long-term I still wonder if the real value here will be in connecting other vendors (furniture, household services etc.) to the recently moved.

Twitter Buys Vine, a Video Clip Company That Never Launched

It’s different than the slew of other video apps currently on the market. Usually when you shoot with your smartphone, the camera captures one continuous shot. Vine allows for punctuated recording. Grab a few quick snips of video, and Vine auto-generates a longer cut stitched from those shots. It’s a novel idea, and hones in on the sweet spot of our ever-dwindling attention spans.

Yet more evidence that Twitter is thinking about how it can pivot their stream from content distributor to content destination. The days of a flat 140 character Twitter stream are dead.

Growing Quality Apps with Open Graph

Starting today, custom actions that automatically publish back to Facebook as a person consumes content in your app will no longer be approved. We will only allow apps that use our built-in actions to automatically publish stories as content is consumed. With built-in actions, we understand the structure of the information and can ensure a better user experience by specializing story formats that can help set user expectations. Apps that currently use a custom content consumption action must migrate to use an applicable built-in action in the next 90 days. If you cannot find an applicable built-in, we encourage you to build a different experience that helps people share meaningful stories with friends on Facebook.

So the experiment with frictionless verbs has obviously been bumpy. While not giving up on it all together Facebook clearly believes that there are only a few types of content that warrant this type of experience. I actually think they got this all backwards. They should have launched with only a few types, gained acceptance and then opened it up to other verbs. Opportunity lost here in my view.

Groupon Serves Up Breadcrumb®, an iPad Point-of-Sale Solution for Hospitality Businesses

Groupon announced the national launch of Breadcrumb®, an easy-to-use, powerful and affordable point-of-sale (POS) solution that runs on iPads for restaurants, bars and cafes. Created by a team of hospitality industry veterans, Breadcrumb removes the complexities and lowers the costs associated with antiquated POS systems.

With the acquisition of Savored and the launch of Breadcrumb it’s pretty clear that Groupon is targeting the restaurant vertical and OpenTable specifically. These are smart moves for a company that desperately needs to ween itself from the toxic daily deals business model.

Introducing Little Bird, the Best Way to Find the Key People Online

Little Bird automates the discovery of community-trusted topic influencers and experts on any topic. You can find the best sources of information online in minutes using Little Bird. Once you find them, we’ve got a whole bunch of very cool tools you can use to leverage their collective knowledge.

Do we need yet another way to measure social influence? I’m not so sure but I’m willing to give Marshall Kirkpatrick and Little Bird the benefit of the doubt. Playing with the beta I do find that the user experience and results might make it a viable tool.