My friends from Adhack.com have just launched a new campaign called “Show us Your Balls.”

The campaign is meant to draw attention to their “People Powered Ads” services for ad creators and ad buyers, ad what better way to do that than with a campaign of their own. The best part is, they’re letting everyone get involved. Here is a more detailed description of the promotion, including an invitation to write the script for the follow-up to this initial teaser video:The campaign is meant to draw attention to their “People Powered Ads” services for ad creators and ad buyers, ad what better way to do that than with a campaign of their own. The best part is, they’re letting everyone get involved. Here is a more detailed description of the promotion, including an invitation to write the script for the follow-up to this initial teaser video:

Popout

Adhack will shoot the follow-up video based on the winning script, and some lucky brand will get its own user-generated ad campaign.

In their own words:

AdHack wants you to Show Us Your Balls! We’ve created part 1 of an awesome video campaign for …. You decide!

Watch the video then write the script for the sequel. We’ll film to the top script and promote your contribution.

AdHack founder James Sherrett says, “The brands that succeed in the world of open advertising harness the power of hearing what passionate, powerful consumers have to say. These are the folks who benefit most from commissioning AdHack commercials and advertisements. They have the balls to let go.”

And of course, all the follow up, mp3s of audio, avatar creator and chance to write the script for the sequel video are at http://adhack.com/balls

I like the fact that this one campaign accomplishes so much:

• It’s a great campaign for Adhack, to better familiarize people with their product and services
• It becomes a great campaign for a lucky brand when the contest is done
• It will serve as an excellent case study of online video ads and their effectiveness when all is said and done.

The future of advertising is now. What are waiting for?

We’re taking a closer at several personal “life stream” platforms, in a effort to discover which offers the best options and features, based on my own set of criteria.

I explained the problem that spawned this little experiment in a previous post on my personal blog, but I’ll sum it up again here briefly. As an online marketer, photographer, “micro-blogger,” and multi-media hobbyist, I’m quite active on the web. I contribute to about 7 blogs regularly, two of those self-hosted, but still a visit to my existing personal blog doesn’t serve as evidence of that activity at all. And since I’ve chosen a WordPress.com hosted site for JordanBehan.com, it doesn’t allow for Javascript widgets or auto-posts from the likes of Flickr or Twitter to reflect that activity.

And so my quest has been to find a “life feed” site of sorts, that will be an accurate representation of the rest of my web activity mixed in with my infrequent personal blog posts. Hence, we dissect the features available from Tumblr.com, Soup.io, OnSugar.com and StoryTlr. I’ve experimented with all four (and many more I assure you) and pitted these against one another in a “Battle Royale-esque” cage match. Let’s size up our challengers:

Tumblr

The Tale of the Tape: Popular among Valley elite types, I had high hopes for Tumblr when I first signed up. An app with this much web cred certainly enters this battle as a heavy favorite.

The Blob by Blow: With the ability to display feeds from a number of sources and services, custom CSS and custom domain options, Tumblr comes out swinging and delivers on everything it promises.

The Decision: Without the ability to create on-site pages or menu navigation of any kind, Tumblr simply doesn’t promise enough, and does not emerge as the victor in our little mano-y-mano. My Tumblog remains live, but unless Tumblr starts rolling our features like Wal Mart rolls back prices, it’s not long for this world.

Soup.io

The Tale of the Tape: Soup enters this battle as one of two underdogs, but the little app from Austria punches way above its weight. Soup has all the functionality of Tumblr with a different (and after a short adjustment period, decidedly better) user interface (UI) for posting items and site layout/design. Offering free custom CSS and free domain mapping, Soup is a serious contender, especially for the price.

The Blow by Blow: For starters, I should mention that moments after joining Soup (and Twittering about it), I had received personal messages from the founder, and both the Soup account and Soup founder Christopher Clay were following me on Twitter. Big bonus points there. But while Soup offers the ability to write a site description with html (effectively letting me hack together a site menu) its lack of pages and real menu options still limit its potential to be our overall winner.

The Decision: I had early excitement about Soup, and had been using it for a cute little romantic project I built for my wife at Nubnoo.com. For this purpose; themed feeds based on search criteria, Soup is an ace. Alas, while I still have my personal Soup feed live and I hold a great deal of sentiment for it, it too comes up short in this project packed with pugilistic puns.

OnSugar.com

The Tale of the Tape: As more of a personal blog platform, and less of a “life stream” service, OnSugar is a bit out of place on this list. Still, I wanted to have a look at its features and offerings. After all, a new blog platform? Well it must be better, right?

The Blob by Blow: OnSugar is easy to use, looks great and does most everything that a personal blogger would want it to do. Except unfortunately for the aforementioned auto-posting from feeds, etc. OnSugar founder Bob Sugar replied to me on Twitter when I talked about this pending post, so he too deserves some credit for the personal touch.

The Decision: Sadly, OnSugar is a mere also-ran in this particular battle, as it doesn’t meet the basic criteria of the contest in question. Still, if you’re looking for a great free blog platform as an alternative to WordPress.com and the like, it’s worth a look.

StoryTlr.com

The Tale of the Tape: It’s built by just two dudes, one in in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. How good could it be? From their About page: “eschnou is our PHP Wizard and alardw the CSS Ninja.” The homepage presents a compelling set of solutions, so this little tool edges its way into our contest as a huge underdog.

The Blow by Blow: Storytlr displays content in two ways: As a “Lifestream” or as “Stories,” which are determined by a start and end date, and comprised of all items from your feed published during that time. As an example, I made a “story” of my trip to Korea last year. While it does not offer me pages or top of page menu navigation, it does offer a detailed “widgetized” sidebar that is satisfactory. Additionally, Storytlr lets you export any of your feeds as a .csv with one click, which is a neat little option for end users wanting to create a simple backup of their publishings.

The Decision: Since a winner must be declared in this tete-a-tete, it’s time to call it. The Champion, by decision, is none other than this surprisingly useful little tool called Storytlr. It offered more functionality, a great UI and the right set of options to almost completely solve my personal site dilemma. No surprise either, when you consider that a certian French blogging visionary seeded the idea in their heads:

From the Storytlr “About” page: A few months ago we saw this video from Loic Lemeur who was asking about a way to help him build ‘the centralized me’. We liked the idea because it sounded like reinventing the good old ‘personal page’, realizing that a blog can only capture one angle of what we did online. More over, we felt that this page had to be personal, and not yet another profile page locked in a social network, and plastered with company branding.

The Conclusion: I’ve ably documented some of the strengths and weaknesses of many of the above contenders, and as the dust settles I’m left with a decision: stick with WordPress and continue with a mostly inactive site, or switch completely to Storytlr, and instead show a noisy feed of Twitters, pics and sundry blog posts. If I am to do the latter, I have a few feature requests for the two Euro whiz kids in question:

1. The ability to create pages, and have them displayed in the top menu navigation below the header.
2. The links to “My 2.0 Life” are great, but they should (have the option of a) link to the profiles in question, not just the feeds.
3. Let me change the names of the Headlines, Tabs, etc. (ie. “Lifestream” = Jordan’s Stuff, “My 2.0 Life” = Anything but “My 2.0 Life”)

If I start to see some of these developing, I’d be happy to pay for the service, fellas.
That concludes this little webby rope-a-dope for now. I’m glad I went through the exercise for a number of reasons, but feel as though it is anything but complete. I hope that you will offer your suggestions and ideas in the comments. I’ll update you on any new findings or game-changing feature releases from these competitors and others in the space.

Please Note: This item is cross-posted from the Strutta blog (my day job). I felt that it was relevant enough to post here as well, as it documents some of the process of launching and marketing a software product, from my perspective.

Last night we received a question from a Strutta user via the contact form. He asked, “When are we going to be not beta? Why is there beta anyway?”

As soon as I read it, I knew that this was the kind of question that warranted its own blog post, so we can define “beta” from our perspective, and shed a bit of light on the process of launching a software product like Strutta.

The short answer is, we have beta so we can launch a product, let folks start using it and start getting their feedback- even though we know that the product can already be made better.

When we launched Strutta back in April, we worked some long days and nights to ensure that when we put the site live, all of the available features had been tested and were working correctly. As soon as we had pushed the site live (okay, perhaps after a few hours of much needed rest) we started fixing known issues and working on the features we couldn’t wait to add.

From the standpoint of our entire team, the most important thing we were waiting to know was how the site would be used, how many people interacted with it, and what kind of feedback we received.

If you’ve been following our blog, you know that a few months back we shifted our development strategy in a big way in response to some of that feedback. We noticed several patterns forming at once: User interaction was low while page views were high, and people kept asking us if they could use our software on /their/ site. An idea, as they say, was born.

We’ve already told the story about the changes happening to Strutta.com, so let’s skip ahead for now and address it later in the post by listing a few items that you can expect from the new version of Strutta. In the meantime, I think the process that we took to launch our product is worth taking a closer look at.

From the Alpha to the Omega

When we first got started developing the product that would become Strutta, we had dozens of meetings to discuss game play, rules, site usability and features. We employed no fewer than three third party web and game designers to consult with the build, and our own development process and meetings helped shape the product and feature-set that we called our “Alpha.”

The day that we finished our Alpha release was the day we celebrated, toasted our work and shaved the beards that much of our staff had grown. But within hours of that micro-celebration, we were already inviting in an initial test group of users to see what we had created. In this case, we physically invited a number of our friends in the Vancouver tech community to our office to come and evaluate what we had built. They may be our friends, but they didn’t hold back with the questions and feedback, and we were listening. Based on their reactions, we got back to work tweaking the site and building out vital features, and before long we were ready for a public beta.

Beta Means We Care

Now, let’s be honest. “Beta” is an overused term in the web space, and it’s fair to say that it’s the software equivalent of a sign that reads “Please be patient during our renovations. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Not that we mean to make excuses for a less-than-perfect product, but there is certainly a benefit to releasing a product to market and start getting feedback sooner rather than later. In our case, that was especially true, as the feedback we received led us to the point we are at now. That’s why I like to think that the little “Beta” tag you see on so many sites means “We care about your feedback. Keep it coming.”

This seems like a good time to mention some of the features that are part of this new version of Strutta, and add a few notes about the changes to our launch plan this time around.

For our impending “re-launch,” we’ve done things a bit
differently. Rather than publish a “mostly ready” product and adjust the
feedback after the fact, we teamed up with a number of launch partners,
asked them how they’d like their contests operated, and made sure that
the development of our core product was aligned with their wants and
needs. Feedback will still be a vital part of the process though, and
that’s why it will be ongoing, and made public for all to see.

New Strutta Features:

• The ability to host a contest at your own domain, or on a free “microsite,” such as YourContest.Strutta.com or CoolContest.YourDomain.com.
• Options to run contests with UGC (user generated content), popular vote or judged.
• Prizes! Since companies will have access to completely customized sites powered by Strutta, they’ll be creating some great contests with some great prizes; for voters and media creators alike.
• A “Get Satisfaction” feedback widget that publicly tracks all of your feedback and our responses to it.

There are a number of ways to bring a software product from the idea stage to launch, and even though the word beta itself might be overused (often out of context), offering your product to select members of the public for early feedback is one idea that should never go away.