Old Spice has shown that it’s one of those companies that understands the digital space. A few months ago, the company aired what became a wildly successful ad featuring Isaiah Mustafa as an over-the-top yet deadpan “manly man” to advertise its products. The quirky campaign returned in June with a follow-up ad.

While the traditional ads stand well by themselves, Old Spice’s online integration really makes the campaign shine. They’re using Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program to reach out to the social networking community. They’re sponsoring a free shipping deal over at BustedTees, a company which (perhaps not coincidentally) sells a shirt based on the Old Spice ads. But their sponsorships and paid advertising pale in comparison to the truly innovative component of the campaign.

Over the course of the last day, Mustafa has starred in a series of over a hundred reply videos on Old Spice’s YouTube channel. Each video directly addresses a comment from a user on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Yahoo Answers, and many were shot and uploaded in just a couple of hours after the original post. The replies retain the voice and humor of the traditional ads, but the content of each is conversational; the replies cover everything from marriage proposals to commercial reenactments. (In some, the Old Spice Man uses other tweets from the commenter as fodder for his reply.)

This is digital advertising at its finest. It’s funny. It doesn’t push the product in every video (some don’t even mention Old Spice at all). It bridges the gap between traditional and digital advertising by using the same actor and character in both media. It treats both popular and lesser-known social networking users equally. And above all, it starts a conversation and generates buzz.

This is where we’re heading.

UPDATE: He/they sent roses to Alyssa Milano, playing off an exchange they’d had earlier in the day. Awesome.

Now developers have a new platform to test their experiments. But while the iPhone ushered in a wave of applications geared around portability and location, the iPad will likely drive developers to create completely new user experiences.

The iPad offers developers a blank 9.7-inch canvas on which they can develop any interface they choose – with the added benefit of multi-touch, positioning sensors, and more. While tablets are not a new concept, they’ve always been built atop the recognized interface and conventions of a traditional computer. Users expect a certain experience with these sorts of applications; if it doesn’t feel familiar, there’s often resistance.

On a new form factor like the iPad, the resistance to change almost completely disappears. The iPad is a new experience from the start and lacks the complex interface of normal computers, allowing developers to spend less time focusing on what people expect and more time focusing on what is natural.

Developers around the world have a new, intuitive interface for applications. Expect to see some true innovation for the iPad over the next few months.

Instead, I’d like to propose a different theory. Amazon’s already attempted to venture into the world of customer-focused service – in the shoe business, no less – with their own Endless.com. Although Amazon’s customer service reputation has generally improved as the company matures, they don’t hold a candle (or throw a shoe at, if you will) the CS credibility held by Zappos.  What if Amazon intends to use Zappos as a model for a new, company-wide customer service philosophy?

What do you think? Could Amazon pull off the Zappos culture? Is that business philosophy even feasible in a company of Amazon’s diversity and size? How could they make that happen (and make it work)?

Now we’ve found it: the trending topics list on Twitter. Nestled among breaking news topics are a spectrum of memes, games started by celebrity Twitterers, and – you guessed it – ads in the form of giveaways. The most recent participant in the race of trending visibility is an ancient content management company that is giving away free MacBooks to random Twitter users that choose to retweet their company’s hashtag… and they’re putting Twitter’s paid sponsors to shame. TechCrunch reports that the latest stunt is using 2.5% of all Twitter traffic.

Twitter trending is the next wave of guerilla brand promotion online, but its lifetime is sure to be short-lived. If other companies hop on the trending bandwagon, there’s likely to be a competition for the limited space on the trending list; that means that there could be more promotions for bigger prizes down the road. But if the 2.5% spirals up with a flurry of new promotions, Twitter users are bound to tire of seeing sanctioned ads for random companies in the streams of the users they follow.

Where’s the tipping point between entering yourself in a hashtag promotion and becoming a burden for spamming a stream?

One of the key tenets of the connected and shared Web world of today is to let best-in-breed service providers handle the complexities of your Web environment. How valid does that philosophy turn out to be when one of the specialized providers has service interruptions?

Services around the Web felt the pinch of service outsourcing this afternoon due to an internal communication problem with Amazon’s S3 and SQS services. The effects of the outage for some were purely cosmetic; Twitter failed to load user avatars for a period starting around noon Eastern time. For others like Basecamp and other 37signals products, the downtime caused features to be disabled temporarily.

The hardest hit this afternoon, though, were services whose entire system revolved around Amazon’s service. Users of SmugMug were greeted with a picture of the service logo watering a garden of servers and a brief message explaining the current situation. The company’s reaction? “We’re not happy about it, of course…”

Amazon does provide a service level agreement (SLA) for their AWS suite; any uptime of less than 99.9% of any given month results in either a 10% or 25% credit of that month’s service cost. (A 6-hour isolated outage on a 31-day month would result in a monthly uptime of 99.2%.) With the number of services that fundamentally depend on external providers for the entirety of their business, is a simple SLA valid?

As SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill wrote this afternoon on the SmugMug Status Updates blog:

Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon’s performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we’ve been afraid an outage like this. I’m sure there will be more over the next few years, too.

While MacAskill’s point may sound pessimistic, it’s historically valid. While using best-of-breed services and APIs provides a service with a host of tangible benefits, it comes with the risk of multiple points of failure for a connected Web business.

(In 2006, MacAskill wrote a post detailing why S3 is a good choice for his business.)

With a device so personal, would you want to allow background applications to broadcast your exact location or status? For me that’s an action I would want to explicitly allow, and that permission would most likely come in the form of actively running the application in the foreground.

I realize the argument may venture be on the borderline of Orwellian paranoia, but there are new considerations that have to be made for such smart mobile devices.