The Genius of Twitter

September 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It was fun to watch so many people rush to talk about Facebook this past week… on Twitter.

There was a delicious irony in that, of course, but it also provoked an underlying and important question: why do we take to Twitter to talk about Facebook and Google+ and everything else? Why not use those platforms for that discussion?

Twitter’s appeal is hard to pin down, and most often we resort to these answers: that it’s real-time, simple, asymmetrical (with following/follower relationships), or that it’s perfectly tailored to mobile usage.

I think there is an even more fundamental explanation, one that lies at the very core of the service  — Twitter is egalitarian (hat tip to my pal Om for providing that perfect word in discussing this point this morning). We stand on equal footing on Twitter; each tweet looks the same, is of similar length, occupies the same number of pixels. The literal design and UI of Twitter creates the appearance of  talking to each other and with one another as equals.

Compare that to Facebook and Google+, which compel us to use nested comments to have a discussion. If Om posts something on Facebook or Google+, I can comment on his post — but my thoughts are portrayed to the world as subordinate to Om’s. The layout echoes the more hierarchical relationship between a publisher and its readers ; my comment is not presented as an equal to Om’s original post, it’s presented as an homage.*

So we all take to Twitter to talk about Facebook because it’s the one place where we feel like our voice is equal to everyone else’s.

Twitter has been counted out by a lot of folks in the past month or so (with the launch of Google+ and the updates for Facebook). Many have complained that Twitter has failed to innovate. I don’t know how or why it has remained so fundamentally unchanged these past five years, but I like to think that obstinate insistence on keeping the service pure, simple — indeed, egalitarian — is the genius of Twitter.

* The nested comment format is, however, perfect for a response to a friend. Indeed, an homage is exactly what we intend in that instance.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Web/Tech

Real-Time Web: It’s about the publishing, not the consumption

October 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

So much of our attention on the real-time web focuses on consumption — the notion that we want more information, faster. This was indeed the focus of our discussions at GigaOm’s “What Comes Next” session earlier this week (see my notes).

But then we all complain about information overload and continuous partial attention. At the very same Bunker session, alpha geeks complained of the Facebook and Twitter overload problem.

I’ve become convinced the real reason people love the real-time web isn’t for the glut of information it produces, but instead because it makes publishing more fun and enjoyable.

It’s all about the near-instant gratification from an “@” reply, or retweet, or a “like” on Facebook. Publishers (and by publishers I mean people who blog, Tweet, foursquare, etc) love this.

Blogging provided some of this in much earlier days, when it was a means of expression for a much smaller, insular, alpha-geek community  — but with a much higher degree of latency. You might write a blog post and  get a comment, or trackback, several hours (or days) later. But this kind of gratification fades over time — in part because so much of what we publish is so perishable — so services like Facebook and Twitter which provide more immediate feedback loops have come to dominate.

The response rate doesn’t have to be high, or targeted, with real-time. It has to be timely. Three or four immediate replies or retweets are ample reward — one can feel heard, listened to, a part of something bigger.

The fact that it’s all about the publishing, and not the consumption, is readily apparent to anyone who digs deeper into Twitter stats. Look at the average click-through rate of a link passed through Twitter by an A-list Twitterer, and you’ll be shocked how low it is. Folks with a million followers are lucky to get a couple of hundred, maybe a couple thousand, people clicking on a link.

All of which is to say: if I were an investor, I’d stay away from companies focused on creating the best possible way to consume “real-time” information. The truth is, other than stockbrokers and traders and people in the news business, most of us don’t really have a need for that. But, there is probably lots of money to be made still from services that use real-time feedback loops to get people to participate, publish, and contribute to a service or platform.

Filed Under: Internet, Web/Tech

Ruh Roh, Tylenol Scare

October 24, 2005 By

Will be very interesting to see if this little nugget breaks out and gets attention.

I was at a company that was accused of privacy violations. Real was hammered because our RealJukebox 2.0 player had a GUID — globally unique identifier, or GUID — which theoretically could have been used to track individual listening habits. We hadn’t informed our customers of this feature, and thus could not have gotten informed consent from them to enable it. And though the GUID was never used to track individual listening habits, and the RealJukebox and RealPlayer were quickly patched to remove the GUIDs altogether and any possibility of this occuring, the fact that the feature was ever included without disclosure to — and informed consent from — our customers understandably troubled many, many people.

We went through a searing, painful, good faith soul-searching after that. We apologized to our customers. We were deeply embarrassed that this mistake could have ever happened. We put processes in place thereafter to scrutinize every service and product we subsequently built to ensure there were no real or apparent privacy violations. But our efforts at being purer-than-pure didn’t matter by that point; the damage with many consumers and customers had been done during a two-week firestorm. Opinions had already been set in stone, and it would be difficult if not impossible to change them. Forever.

And here lies Google’s potential hazard with web accelerator — they run the risk of creating an appearance of violating users’ privacy, regardless of how pure they may think they are being with regard to the actual facts. They appear to disclose what they’re collecting with GWA. But the fact that they’re collecting this data at all will prove troubling to many folks. Even if they are legally, technically within the bounds of accepted online privacy behaviors, many may wonder why they really need to collect data from third party sites their customers visit and cache that data. And once that questioning starts, it is hard to put an end to it.

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Reason to Worry?

October 18, 2005 By

Battelle had a small little item the other day that caught my attention: Google, breaking what seems to be a pretty cardinal rule, intruding on the pristine white space of the home page, to promote their search toolbar.

Since that item the other day, I have seen the promotion not only on the Google home page, but at the bottom of various search results pages. If they’re intruding on the pristine white space, and breaking cardinal rules, I can think of just three explanations:

1. That the distribution costs have gotten too high at the margins to make it economical to rely mainly on third parties for distribution.

2. That they feel like there are no longer any viable, high volume third party software makers with whom they can ally themselves, and are taking matters into their own hands to guarantee distribution. Maybe related to this.

3. They’re plotting trendlines out two to three quarters, see trouble, and are getting a little panicked.

Probably #1, maybe #2, and only time will tell if number 3 is a factor.

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Truly a Pathetic Excuse

October 14, 2005 By

One of the more interesting and memorable (and, in retrospect, utterly depressing) moments at the Web2 conference last week occurred when John Battelle asked Terry Semel about Yahoo in China, and the recent case in which Yahoo turned over information to Chinese authorities about a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, that led to his imprisonment for 10 years.

I listened carefully, and I am pretty sure that Semel’s justification for this was: "We have to adhere to the laws of the countries in which we do business." That has been their consistent line of defense since early September.

It all seemed so reasonable, so sensible, so justifiable when he said it, even if there was a slight smell of bullshit about the claim. But as I’ve thought about it more, I am shocked and ashamed I didn’t stand up and scream, and that others didn’t either. This justification and kind of excuse is as outrageously offensive as the actual act.

A few years ago, a book came out about IBM’s collaboration with the Nazis in the late 1930s; specifically, that IBM provided the punch card technology that enable the Nazi government to identify and catalog Jews living in Germany. I have still not read the book, but there is a good summary from a Business Week article from the time here.

I found, and still find, that discovery stunning, and the collaboration by IBM with the Nazis reprehensible and beyond justification. Of course, it may be unfair to equate that act with what Yahoo, Cisco and others are doing now; no one is claiming Chinese authorities are using US technology to engage in genocide. (Remember, though, that preceding regimes had no problem killing tens of millions of Chinese citizens).

But isn’t it bad enough that Yahoo, Cisco and others are actively collaborating with and supporting the current Chinese government in their systematic, clear, unambiguous repression of basic human rights? Isn’t that bad enough? Or, is imprisonment and repression not enough, and do they only cross the line when millions are killed as a result of their actions?

The argument (Semel made this, too) is that we may not like their laws, we may not like their human rights record, but it is better to engage than walk away. I spent two years traipsing through China while working for Real, and I actually buy the constructive engagement argument in general terms.

But I think you have to draw the line when you at active support for and cooperation with policies and programs that clearly violate human rights. Turning over Shi Tao’s name was such a clear violation of human rights. Period. So is the provisioning of routers by Cisco to enable China and Myanmar to filter out speech those regimes don’t like or approve.

I side with those beginning to boycott Yahoo! I’ll stay away from their products from now on, including the beloved flickr and my yahoo and yahoo mail. And I hope the smart, sensitive and thoughtful folks who work at Yahoo that I’ve met will press on their bosses to do better. And maybe the famous bloggers will take a break from their pet causes and more parochial issues to devote  some time to this.

Filed Under: China, Digital Media, Politics, Web/Tech
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