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[Note: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter. ]
When I say, “Nobody gets Twitter,” this is what I mean.
Dana Boyd (dana boyd) who — just take my word on this — has a PhD in “getting it,” wrote a short, but (as always) insightful and thought-provoking post a couple of days ago titled, “Twitter is for friends; Facebook is everybody.
Of course, the title itself is a slap-in-the-face challenge to the conventional wisdom of all those who believe they get Twitter and social networking. To those who get Twitter (I purposely don’t), it is supposed to be very public and all about having as many followers as possible so you can use it for 10 Different Ways to Build Your Brand or something.
To those who get social networking, young people don’t use Twitter because they prefer Facebook’s status update — because it’s something only their friends see — and not their parents.
But Dana writes of a conversation she had with some extremely tech-savvy high school seniors including one named Dylan who said:
“as for twitter, we are totally not representative, but ya a lot of people use twitter. it’s funny because the way they are using it is not the way most do… they make private accounts and little sub-communities form. like cliques, basically. so they can post stuff they don’t want people on fb to see, since fb is everybody. it’s odd, because the way i see it get used with my friends is totally contradictory to what everyone is saying. people seem to think teens hate twitter because it’s totally public, but the converse is actually true. but it’s not everyone… probably 10-15% at most.”
Gee.
Twitter’s little “protect your tweets” feature is something that people who get Twitter probably don’t get.
I know of at least one person who reads this blog who has two Twitter accounts for precisely this reason.
For her, there is a public reason for using Twitter. And a private reason.
She figured it out a long time ago, but because I don’t get Twitter, I’m just now appreciating how savvy she has been in understanding that, at least with one of her Twitter usernames, the coolest thing about Twitter is how few followers she has.
[Note: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter. ]
As you can see from the tweet above, a week or so ago I came to the conclusion that the folks running Twitter either don’t use it, don’t care or are clueless that the Trending Topics feature has turned into nothing more than a spam magnet.
On Saturday, search-guru Danny Sullivan provided an insightful break-down of what the problem is:
“Because of how prominent trends are — people will click trends links out of curiosity — people are putting out tweets that contain the trending words but which have nothing to do with the topic.
How can the folks at Twitter continue to promote something so prominently — Trending Topics is a part of the sidebar navigation — that is doing little more than encouraging spammers to find ways to hack the service? Could it be that the folks at Twitter never click on those Trending Topics links?
During the past week or so, Dave Winer started and others like Marshall Kirkpatrick followed in taking an indepth look at the way in which the people who work at Twitter use it and how that may influence their perception, and thus, their focus on what may, or may not, be policies and priorities for the service. It is logical — and obvious — that how those who run and own Twitter use it as individuals — or don’t use it — means a lot to what it will become.
Like the internet, itself, Twitter is one of those “blind men and the elephant” things that can be whatever people use it for. I have — in a light-hearted way, but with sincere belief — characterized this as the Twitter “get it” paradox. Simply, that when one believes he or she “gets” what Twitter is, they don’t. Indeed, believing that you “get it” blinds you to newer and more profound ways of understanding and using it. (This “blinded by the light” seems especially true among those who assume they’ve “gotten it” when they realize Twitter can be used blast out marketing messages.)
Twitter is never just what you think it is.
For example, last week, an event media team from Hammock created and managed a real-time site for a client’s annual conference that allowed — among other things — anyone to watch a stream of tweets from attendees. Tech-oriented conferences have done this for a couple of years and heavy users of Twitter can easily recognize and “get” what we were doing. But the simple act of making the “back-channel” of Twitter part of the front page of an event made many of the attendees (most of whom who are not techies) change their minds about the potential of the service — to see it as something more than where people say what they are eating for lunch.
The versatility of what can be done with Twitter — that the service can be used by developers, editors and producers like our event media folks — underscores the importance for those who run it to not, themselves, begin to believe it is any one thing.
What Danny Sullivan, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer and others (including my small voice) seem to be doing is trying to avoid the train-wreck of unintended consequences that happen when founders and owners start believing their own hype.
I don’t get Twitter. But I follow more users and tweet more than the people who work there. If you don’t know what that means, you missed the Clue Train when it pulled out of the station.
Here is one thing everyone should get: Twitter is nothing without the people who use it.
It is they (we) who will make it into whatever it becomes. Or who will leave it to move onto the next thing if, like many others before them, those who believe they have the power to control what Twitter is, try to force it into being something that it’s not.
(A catch-up post after a week of travel.)
When I saw that Twitter was on the cover of Time, I couldn’t help but remember a long, long ago post on this blog where I linked to a quote from Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard:
“At Forbes we like to say that when a story appears on the cover of Time of Newsweek, it is “top-ticked.” Which means, if Time or Newsweek declares a new trend, the trend has peaked. If Time or Newsweek loves a hot stock, sell.”
I should point out that the context of the quote was a 2005 post in which Karlgaard was pointing out that during a week in which Time and Newsweek both declared the Bush presidency “dead,” his popularity had risen. Of course, we now know that the “top-tick” rule didn’t work that go ’round — and in the end, the dead presidency didn’t rise.
*The title of this post in a homage to my friend Steve Rubel who declared with amazing accuracy the exact moment that Twitter peaked back in March, or, a few tens of millions of users ago.
For a couple of months, I’ve had a running “gag” on Twitter that, in jest, suggests that New York Times writers are required to have a Twitter-angle to every story they file. It’s an easy thing to poke fun at, as the Times seems obsessed with the topic of Twitter. For example, today there’s a story about webcasting and tweeting hospital procedures. Also, “Twitter” is one of the only “Times Topics” subjects I have run across that has two entries: one for business stories and the other for, well, anything else about Twitter.
Ironically, however, in glancing back through my recent posts and “tweets,” I’ve noticed that the joke is on me: I regularly tweet and post in response to things I read in the Times. The Times matters to me. Content from the website NYTimes.com flows through many of the tools I use to monitor the news and information related to my business and personal interests. I make lots of decisions based on what I read in the Times (or, most likely, on the Times).
In reality, I’m a great fan of the New York Times coverage of things related to online identity and expression that collectively have the popular umbrella title, social media. The Times is one of the few news organizations that has seriously focused its editorial resources on coverage of the business implications and technology related to social media, as well as trying to interpret how the different tools and platforms are being used — not only by marketers and media companies — in ways that are having an impact on all facets of our lives. I often get riled by the spin one of their stories takes, but that’s typically because I’m too close to the topic and am not, at least for that story, one of the general-interest readers for which it is intended.
From time to time, I also disagree with a NYT management business decision related to online media, but I’m impressed with the work of whoever there gets coverage, development and design decisions out the door.
So, while I will keep joking about the New York Times coverage of social media, I’ll keep reading it.
[I have another couple of posts to demonstrate what I mean. I'll be posting them later today.]
As I don’t always like reading multiple posts on one topic in reverse chronological order, I’ve created a page on which I’ll display “Thoughts on Twitter” posts chronologically. At some point, I will also create the eBook, Kindle, PowerPoint and audible versions, as well. (That last sentence was a joke.)
Here’s where to read the one-page chronological version: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter
[Note: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter. ]
In interviews (lots and lots of interviews), the creators of Twitter (Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone) admit they are surprised by the level of hype Twitter is receiving. Being savvy and experienced in such things, they know also that hype doesn’t always equate to the adoption of new technology or, more importantly, to business success. Indeed, they have personal experience in this reality as Twitter, itself, rose from the ashes of a failed venture — a highly visible (at least among a small corner of the geekosphere) and stinging failure: the crash and burn of Odeo, a podcasting platform.
Unlike the typical early Web 2.0 startups that tried out “on the road” during a period of “closed beta” testing before heading to Broadway, Odeo was announced to the world in a major New York Times story before it was ever operational. Before the first user ever registered, CEO Evan Williams was quoted in the Times declaring Odeo was going to be “an eBay for podcasting.”
Evan (who goes by @ev on Twitter) tried to do some expectation-reducing spin control after that New York Times article appeared, but the damage was done: the service was defined by that article — and his quote — before Odeo ever appeared in public, before its users could try it out and decide for themselves what it was all about. It didn’t help that Ev and the other developers weren’t podcasters, as they missed some of the nuances of the medium, as in, their platform wasn’t that good and, to no surprise of anyone, podcasting didn’t need an eBay. The real killer, however, was the decision by Apple to support RSS (the technology underlying the distribution or “‘casting” part of podcasting) in its iTunes Store and later when Apple added a few podcasting-friendly metaphors to the user interface of its audio production software, GarageBand. Both decisions drowned out any interest in either the technology or marketplace of Odeo.
But hey, I wish we all could fail so wonderfully as Odeo did. Evan became a Harvard Business School case study of entrepreneurial angst and finally, in October 2006, Evan and his Odeo partners returned the money to Odeo investors (Evan had already done well in selling another startup, Blogger, to Google) who seemed to appreciate getting their money back. (Later, they sold the podcasting remnants of Odeo, as well. The current service at the URL is no longer associated with Twitter.)
Ev and his partners decided to focus on Twitter.com — a little feature of Odeo they had spun off as a separate product a few months earlier. When they launched Twitter (first called twittr) no on in the universe, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch understood what it was — not even Evan, Jack and Biz, as evidenced by the current interviews.
With Twitter, there were no pre-release chats with non-bloggersphere reporters and no attempts to define the product narrowly to a reporter from New York Times. As I recall, Ev and Biz and Jack did little to get people to sign up on Twitter in 2006 — beyond, of course, depending on having a core group of registered users among those who will register on anything appearing on TechCrunch.
Unlike with Odeo, the creators didn’t get bogged down in trying to answer questions about how it worked or why anyone would want to use it. They didn’t say it was a service that could help you could discover if one of your friends was in the same bar or concert you happened to be — the way others did who launched similar ventures around the same time, or earlier. They didn’t define Twitter as anything, other than a means to relay messages via the web, RSS or text message. In fact, they didn’t make it location based, at all. They didn’t even stress that it was a mobile platform, something that would have been more trendy then, and now, among investors.
They simply set up the service. And this time, they actually started playing around with it themselves. Unlike their apparent disinterest in podcasting, they seemed to enjoy tweeting. But they didn’t make lots of rules about how other people should tweet — and when users started putting “@” in tweets and “#” in tweets, they didn’t tell them not to, they just adapted to what Twitter users were doing.
Back then, the creators seemed to embrace the idea that no one — including them if you believe the interviews — actually got Twitter. It was not until March of 2007 at South by Southwest Interactive that Twitter actually “debuted” with a bang. SXSW 2007 will be remembered as the place where Twitter took off.
And by taking off, I mean “the hype.”
But unlike with Odeo, the hype did not cause the failure of Twitter (although it did help surface lots of scalability dilemmas that could have led to later failure had they not be caught and dealt with then). But the hype did turn Twitter into something the creators never envisioned — and something they apparently still (just like the rest of us) don’t quite get.
Because recently, the creators of Twitter did something that is completely contradictory to the way in which Twitter succeeded earlier: they added a list of suggested people to follow for those who now register on Twitter for the first time. (Biz Stone blogs here the reason from his point of view.)
I didn’t understand the problem with having “suggested users to follow” until last Friday when Dave Winer posted a screen grab of “what a new Twitter user sees.” Looking at it convinced me that had the “suggested users to follow” option been available when I first joined Twitter, I doubt I would have ever used it a second time. Because if I had chosen the 20 default users the creators of Twitter are now suggesting, I would have never used Twitter because these users (as demo’d on Dave’s screen grab) reinforce to me the commonly-held belief that Twitter is completely banal and useless.
By adding default suggested users, the creators have created an unintended consequence: They are projecting how “they get” Twitter to new users who should be allow to “get” Twitter in a completely different way.
Instead of suggesting users new users you believe people should follow, help them discover users they may actually want to follow: It would be better for someone to sign up and have no default users than to sign up and have Twitter pre-selected users. Here’s a suggestion to the creators of Twitter. Replace the default users option with a link to a page that tells people how to find people to follow.
Keep it simple and suggest they do two things:
1. Click on the “advanced search” button on Twitter Search and look at all of the ways you can search for specific people or track topics you may be interested in.
2. Use the new search box and “save search” features on your user page and look for people who tweet about the topics you are interested in.
There are lots of ways that Twitter can be used for interesting, enlightening or, even, vital purposes. Following the 20 users the creators of Twitter suggests is not one of them.
[Note: You can view all my "Thoughts on Twitter" posts displayed chronologically here: http://www.RexBlog.com/thoughts-on-twitter. ]
On Twitter (where you can follow me: @r) I continuously mock the way in which media — especially the New York Times — seem obsessed with running Twitter-related stories every day. As I’ve said before, “I love Twitter, I just hate reading about Twitter.”
Because of this, I’ve tried very hard to throttle back posts about Twitter on this blog — and have failed.
So I give. Over the coming days, I’m going to be posting lots of thoughts on Twitter in a hope to purge myself of this need to explain things that I don’t believe need explaining — nor can be explained.
If you don’t want to read any more about Twitter, well, neither do I. But I’ve got to off-load some of these thoughts — for therapy, if nothing else.
I am always intrigued by how people — even those who have never used Twitter before — describe what they think it is. In some ways, it sounds like a blind person trying to describe the color blue. But in other ways, it’s like a sighted person trying to describe the color blue. It’s just not something blind or sighted people need to do — blue is blue. It’s light blue or dark blue or the blue of a crisp spring-day afternoon or the blue of a tempest-tossed sea. Blue is best described in metaphors — not in scientific formulas that measure the refraction of light or in PMS numbers.
Twitters that way. The more you try to describe it, the more you realize you’re getting more and more bogged down in metaphors and dependent on ways that describe what you can use Twitter to do — not what Twitter is. That, or you get bogged down in a technical argument about protocols or identity or business models.
As I have said and will say over-and-over until I get it right, nothing you ever hear people say about Twitter should surprise you anymore. If you hear someone say school systems should drop math requirements in order to require children to take courses on how to use Twitter, don’t be surprised. If tomorrow, you wake up and hear that everyone has decided to never use Twitter again, don’t be surprised.
Nothing you hear about Twitter is reality — it’s someones perception. But it’s not reality.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll try again: As much as you want to think you get Twitter, you don’t. The people who created Twitter didn’t get it — and they still don’t, as I’ll get to in a later post.
And you don’t get Twitter. And neither do I.
We don’t get Twitter even if we:
• Thoroughly understand how you use Twitter.
• Thoroughly understand everything possible about how Twitter’s underlying technology or API works.
• Thoroughly understand all the marketing, PR, communication, community, fund-raising, public safety, policy, promotional, governmental, educational, religious, health-care, journalistic, philosophical, etc., etc. uses and implications of Twitter.
• Attend every conference, seminar, workshop, camp, tweetup or university course on Twitter.
• Have a million followers and post a thousand tweets.
• Understand the psychological or practical reasons different types of people use Twitter to bolster their ego, cope with depression or any number of mental illnesses, build their personal brands, develop family-only emergency communication networks, broadcast random updates to friends or track information and relationships related to their work or personal lives.
• Track and comprehend all of the third-part applications that provide a wide array of practical solutions for segmenting and organizing groups of people, topics of discussions.
Unfortunately, the more you know about Twitter, the more you realize it is incomprehensible.
More unfortunately, the moment you decide you’ve got it, you become a defender of your point-of-view. You become a traditionalist and advocate of that point of view. For example, if you believe the point of Twitter is “social media,” then you claim those who believe it is a means to send out news headlines don’t get it. If you decide you get it as something that is a time-wasting exercise in ego-boosting, you cut yourself off from understanding its potential to save lives in an emergency.
Your goal should not be to comprehend Twitter. Your goal should be to use Twitter in the service of your specific passions and interests — not someone elses.
My advice to anyone about Twitter is this: stop being obsessed with Twitter itself. It’s just one little instrument (literally, “little,” say, about the size of a percussionist’s triangle) in an orchestra of online instruments with which people may express themselves, be creative, form community, send out alerts, links and headlines, etc. When you start thinking any one instrument is the whole orchestra, you miss the point.
If you are passionate about Oprah, then, fine, Twitter is an Oprah-following tool. If you are passionate about keeping up with swine flu, then Twitter is a swine-flu tracking tool. If you are passionate about communicating with 500 other people who joke around with each other, Twitter is a community chat tool. (I could go on and on.)
As I said the other day, Twitter is best understood by individuals in the way Apple advertises the iPhone: by defining it in ways that help you understand what you can do with the iPhone, rather than by trying to define the iPhone.
No matter what you are interested in or passionate about, there’s a way to use Twitter for that.
I have some advice for writers who think the world wants another column about Twitter. They don’t. Nor do they want another blog post. But obviously you, nor I, get that yet.
I know, I know. You’re thinking if people care that Maureen Dowd “would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account,” then shouldn’t they care that you think Twitter is ridiculous, also?
No. And they especially don’t care that you believe Twitter is ridiculous for any of these three reasons: 1. No one cares that someone is eating a sandwich. 2. No one cares that someone is riding an elevator. 3. No one cares that someone is getting a car washed.
Today, the Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway wrote her version of “The Twitter Column”. Granted, Lucy tries a head-fake with her column by saying she believes Twitter is “potentially the best communication tool there is” but then uses 90% of her space to tell business executives that no one cares if they get their car washed, eat a sandwich, etc.
Lucy — like most columnists preparing to write “The Twitter Column” — did a lot of research to become an expert on Twitter.
She signed on last week and used exectweets.com to read a few updates from business people who use Twitter. (Note: you don’t need a Twitter account to read what people write using Twitter or exectweets.) After a couple of days, Lucy had enough insight to conclude that Twitter (or Yammer, a behind the firewall enterprise Twitter-like service) could be good because “employees who happen to have good ideas could easily have more followers than the chief executive. Still more revealing would be the ratio of followers to followed, as it tells you whether people are not just talking but also listening.”
Lucy, for example, follows no one on her account. Very revealing, indeed.
My advice for columnists who are dying to write their Twitter column: Don’t. Twitter is not what you think it is.
But don’t feel alone in not “getting” Twitter. No one does.
Note: This is my last post about Twitter (for at least ten minutes).
I don’t get Twitter.
I don’t get Twitter despite being on Twitter for two years and five months and posting 4,304 updates and having about 3,000 people decide for some reason I don’t get to follow the random stuff I add to Twitter.
What’s especially frustrating to me about not getting Twitter is that one of my professional and personal passions is gaining an understanding of new media platforms and approaches by living in them — and not just visiting them. In other words, I do more than study things like Twitter, I immerse myself in them and ponder what they mean and where they fit in people’s lives. A part of what I do for clients and others is to understand things like Twitter, so I can help them understand them. Translation: I get paid to get Twitter.
But I don’t get Twitter.
Because if I got Twitter, I would understand why lots of people who use it — even many of those to whom I look for help in understanding things like Twitter — are insisting that somehow a line of demarcation exists between those who started using Twitter before Oprah did last Friday and those who have started using it since then.
Sure, sure, I understand that @Oprah is being used symbolically as the mainstreaming of what used to be a fun geeks-only sandbox. Hey, I was there back in the day. But Twitter stopped being a geek sandbox the first day someone with a marketing job signed on and wrote a blog post with a title like, “Five ways to build your brand on Twitter.”
And sure, sure, Oprah endorsing anything means that millions of real people follow along — just ask President Obama.
Back to Oprah in a minute, but first let me explain why the whole “getting Twitter” is so difficult for me.
The reason I don’t get Twitter is this: Twitter is nothing but a blank box into which you type up to 140 characters. You then hit a button and those characters feed out to anyone who wants to receive them. That’s all Twitter is. Everything else is what you do with Twitter. But it’s not Twitter.
OK. Let me attempt to explain this another way.
You know those iPhone commercials that carpet-bomb TV all day and night — the ones that say, “There’s an app for that.”? Those commercials do not explain what an iPhone is. They explain what you can do with an iPhone. And 99% of the time, they are using an “app” created by a company other than Apple as an example of what you can do with an iPhone,.
Other mobile phone companies historically have tried to sell phones based on calling plans or coverage area or price. But Apple just runs the commercials over and over that say, “Do you want to do this? Then there’s an app for that.”
Now, let’s apply that idea to Twitter.
When I hear people say that other people don’t get Twitter, inevitably they are referring to how they understand how they use Twitter but the other person doesn’t perceive Twitter in the same way. To me, that’s like trying to say someone who uses the iPhone to talk on the phone doesn’t get the iPhone because they haven’t figured out yet how to do their banking on it.
To carry this metaphor a little further: If I want to keep up with the best deal Amazon is offering today on MP3s, there’s a way to use Twitter to do that. If I want to keep up with the latest news headlines from the New York Times, there’s a way to use Twitter to do that. If I want to discuss stocks with day-traders, there’s a way to use Twitter to do that. If I want to follow people who are discussing Twitter to discuss the NFL draft, there’s a way to do that. (There’s a way to use Twitter to do just about everything.)
However, if I start trying to define what Twitter is or isn’t, not what you can do with Twitter, I fail. It’s like when you start thinking there’s an iPhone app for just about everthing, and then a new one comes along that does something different or better or cooler so you have to rethink what iPhone apps can be or do — That’s the problem with “getting” Twitter. Everyday, someone comes up with another way to use it and you have to rethink what it means to get it.
About six months ago, celebrities started discovering how they could use Twitter to do an end-run around their publicists and handlers and the tabloids and the paparazzi and beam out messages directly to anyone wanting to receive them. To me, that’s about as obvious a use of Twitter as celebrities discovering they can use an iPhone to call up their friends. So, duh, celebrities are now flocking onto Twitter and using it in a different way than I do.
See, I love Twitter because I view it as a conversational tool. I find the back-and-forth and the interaction informative and enriching. I used to think if you understood that about Twitter then you got it. But then I recalled I like getting updates from Amazon about MP3 deals — but I never reply to robots.
Back to Oprah.
I think Oprah will one day get Twitter as much as anyone does. Sure, I’d like for her to get it the conversational way and maybe she will — because Oprah is Oprah — and Oprha has, more than anyone in history perhaps, mastered the power of conversational media. Her talent has always been the ability to project genuine empathy for her audience and to let them talk — as much as being talked to. She is like a great teacher who doesn’t just lecture, but helps her audience learn by taking them along a conversational journey and letting them share their own versions and insights. She has mastered the art of making the audience feel special, of allowing them to win and take home special stuff. She has mastered the art of admitting failure and apologizing when she’s wrong. Sure, she heads up an amazing industrial-strength hype complex, but there is no way someone can sustain the longevity of success she has enjoyed without being the real deal.
It doesn’t really matter if she gets Twitter like me. That’s because she will immediately get Twitter in her way — and that will be a way that turns it into a means to promote positive causes to a massive number of followers. It’s not how I get Twitter, but it will be a better understanding of Twitter than those who are trying to prove they get it simply by saying they’ve been using it longer than @Oprah.
[Note #1: I fear this post suggests I believe Twitter can do no wrong. However, if you think I think that, you don't get it. I'll blog another day about the reasons it bothers me that Twitter is owned by a private company and is not an Internet "protocal" or standard." I start getting concerned when things that are owned by private companies become "too big to fail."]
[Note #2: This is not the first, nor last, time I have, or will, blog about my inability to understand Twitter: I've covered this theme on 4/3/2009, 1/16/2009 and February 3, 2008.]
A few years ago, I wrote a post that included an accidental list of seven recommendations about blogging. I just ran across it and decided if the words blog and blogging were changed to refer to Twitter, it could be another accidental list:
1. Don’t apply mass-media metrics (number of followers) in measuring the success of your personal or business use of Twitter.
2. Don’t let any third-party Twitter metric application — and I’m not referring to a specific application as I can’t keep up with them — define your authority or popularity or pecking order.
3. Start using Twitter for the same reasons you have a telephone or email: You need a means to join in a conversation.
4. Start using Twitter so you can easily post messages and point to photos and other digital files accessible by anyone on the web — or by only a private group of people who you allow to follow you on Twitter if you decide to “control” who sees your Twitter updates (i.e., your employees or members of your family).
5. If you run a business, start using Twitter because one day, I promise, you will be glad you have a place to respond when the conversation is about you.
6. Use Twitter because there are two or three people who actually matter in your life or work, or who share your passion for a particular topic.
7. Use Twitter because once or twice a day, you see an article or joke or something that today you forward by email to a group of people. (Hint: stop emailing them, post the link on Twitter and tell your friends your Twitter username.)
Where to follow me on Twitter: @r
[Note: A guessay is an essay comprised mainly of guesses.]
In a post on Friday (when rumors were swirling about the possibility of Google acquiring Twitter), I suggested that the acquisition of Twitter could add tremendous value to Google search results by adding real-time data from our (all Twitter users’) collective stream-of-consciouness. I suggested (as have many, many others) that Google’s PageRank algorithms could benefit greatly from all of the real-time linking that millions of Twitter users do.
In my post, I included a line that made some people think I was suggesting that the number of followers a Twitter user has is an indication of the authority Google might award links shared (or, as Dave Winer terms it, “pushed”) by that user. I got a few e-mails from people disagreeing with what they thought I was saying: “The number of followers one has is not necessarily a measurement of someones link-sharing skills,” is typical of what the e-mailers said.
First things first: Despite implying it, I didn’t actually say nor mean the number of followers indicates authority. Indeed, I whole-heartedly agree that the number of followers one has on his or her Twitter account is NOT in and of itself, a measure of authority. Lots of followers on Twitter may be an indication of authority, however it is likely rather a measurement of popularity, celebrity, strategy or an annointment from Twitter’s management.
So no, if Google owned Twitter, the PageRank of links would not be based on such an easy-to-game or manipulate (or what would be called “optimized” by people seeking fees to manipulate it) thing as having lots of followers. If that were so, a tweet-turbo’d Google would be handing over search results to @the_real_shaq and whoever ghost-tweets for @britneyspears.
No. If Google owned Twitter, there would be a great mystery surrounding exactly how Google measures linking authority on Twitter — and likely it would merely turn the whole thing over to its pigeons to figure out. And by pigeons, of course I mean Google’s secret-sauce PageRank algorithms the company describes this way:
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
I (and anyone else who writes using lots of hyperlinks) have served as one of those Google voters for a long time. So I have developed my personal theories about what goes into PageRank algorithms. (There’s a whole industry called Search Engine Optimization that, figuratively speaking, sacrifices virgins to please the Google PageRank Algorithm Gods.) Based on my vast experience (translation: guesses and theories), here are some factors I think would be be applied by Google in determining the relative value of a link pushed via Twitter — if Google owned Twitter.
1. The number of followers your followers have would be more important than the number of followers you have. And that measure would cascade out several levels. This is somewhat akin to the “strength of schedule” factor in the BCS formula.
2. Extreme ratios of followers to following and vice versa would cause authority to fall. Discounting (or ignoring) high follower/following users would lessen the influence (i.e., ability to game) of celebrity Twitterists. And kicking out high following/follower users would undermine Twitter spam efforts.
3. User accounts that crank out high numbers of tweets will be discounted unless the tweets are posted from various third-party clients. In other words, high volume tweeting would be thought to be automated unless there are markers indicating the user is an actual human named Scoble or Brogan.
4. Tweeting about a limited number of topics would probably be rewarded. I am not a fan of directories of Twitter users. I find them an easy target for gaming schemes. However, I have one thing to praise about a recent entry to the Twitter directory category, WeFollow.com. It requires a Twitter user to do something akin to declaring a major. To be listed, your must limit where you Twitter feed will appear to three categories. For example, I limited my account @r to smallbusiness, nashville and another category I’ve forgotten. Seeing WeFollow force Twitter users into defining the category of their “authority” makes me think Google would likely tweak the PageRank algorithm to anticipate the categories of links in which Twitter users might have authority, rather than giving any link they add on any topic the same weight.
5. While “re-tweeting” and “replies” may appear to be indicators of authority, I think they would be discounted due to factors related to “celebrity” or automation.
6. The real golden goose (or golden pigeon) that Google would use to juice up its algorithms would be actual clicks. Google knows more about measuring, analyzing and making money from click throughs than any other company will ever know. If, in a scenario that was merely rumor on Friday, Twitter was bought by Google, it would throw lots of a resources into understanding which Twitter users generate the most clicks-throughs on links they “push” out via Twitter.
Sidenote 1: Dave Winer demonstrates and explaines a means of measuring the relative clickiness o links he pushes out via Twitter.
Sidenote 2: Here’s a Greasemonkey script (and a demo from Doc Searls) that shows related “tweets” on a Google search results page. This is not exactly what I’m talking about in this post, but is cool, nevertheless.
*A guessay is an essay comprised of guesses.
From a PsychologyToday.com blog comes this, the awsomest quote ever about Twitter:
“Can Twitter possibly aid in achieving authentic being, or is it fundamentally “mitwelt” - reinforcing the social and interpersonal aspects of life, and thus a distraction from “eigenwelt” - where the treasure of the self is hidden?”
The date on the post was March 27, not April 1. But still.
Up next: yet another post about Twitter.
On Twitter (where else?) today, I’ve added a few tweets to the teacup tempest taking place over whether or not Google is buying Twitter. (More on that topic in a minute.)
As I have close friends who have no idea what Twitter is and other close friends who are passionate in their beliefs that Twitter’s hegemony should be stopped before it dominates the world, I find myself in a rather odd place of trying to interpret what Twitter is to people who know more than me, and those who know less. No lie, I once spent 45 minutes in a cab trying to explain Twitter to a member of the Federal Communications Commission. And failed. Today, I spent 30 minutes visiting with a business owner friend of mine who started asking about Twitter and, while my explanation has now been honed by hundreds of attempts, I still fear I was a little foggy.
Such experiences have led me to write that Twitter is inexplicable if you attempt to understand (or explain) what it is. Rather, Twitter is something that must be understood or explained by what you can do with it. And because it is impossible for any two people to use Twitter in exactly the same way (if this were a longer post, I’d explain the reason in existential — or if I were smart enough, algebraic — terms), Twitter explanations tend to make it sound ridiculously inane (You tell people what you’re doing) or unbelievably hyped (It’s the most important marketing tool since smoke signals).
But today, among people who actually use Twitter, the possibility of it being purchased by Google led to some interesting observations that I think require me to once more explain what I think Twitter is. What it really is.
First, what Twitter isn’t: It’s not technology. On Twitter today, someone “replied” to me that Google would never purchase Twitter because they didn’t need its technology.
I agree 100% with the “not needing the technology” part, however, Twitter has never been about technology. Its technology sucked for most of its first two years. But don’t take my word on this argument. I’ll point you to a quote from Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist whose firm was the first outside investor in Twitter. Back in January, Fred wrote (in the post linked above), “Twitter has never been about technology….Twitter, like all social media, is about the people who use it.”
Twitter is people. It’s the sum of everything put into it by everyone with an account. Not only that, it’s the sum of everything put into it, along with a means to extrapolate the potential relative authority of each “data point” added to it. You add potential value to it by who you choose to follow.
And that leads me back to Google.
I have no idea whether or not Google will buy Twitter. But I do know this. If it does, it won’t be to serve up ads on people’s Twitter user pages or because they can make money from aggregating tweets and putting them into banner ads.
Twitter is the closest thing there is to being able to peer real time into the collective stream of consciousness of tens of millions of people. For fun or work, all day long, these millions make observations and — the golden goose potentially for Google — they point to web content they find interesting.
Those links, when parsed and crunched and “algorithimed” by Google’s page rank pigeons, could make its search results even more accurate and more timely.
And the competitive advantage would be, anybody? anybody?
Us.
We are Twitter. We are the “turks” (as in The Turk) that power Twitter. As long as Twitter provides me with a service I can’t match elsewhere (i.e., a platform that has millions of people who are already using it who can one-click “follow” me) and treats me right (i.e., doesn’t try to “monetize” me in a way that treats me as little more than a spam target), then I have little incentive to leave. And as long as I’m there, along with all the inanity I contribute to Twitter, I’ll still keep being a turk for someone, perhaps Google, to use in narrowing their search results.
Now this is hilarious.
Daniel Terdiman at CNET wrote that Twitter users attending South by Southwest Interactive are complaining of the overload and noise caused by everyone who is attending the event using the “hastage sxsw” (#swsx) on anything they “tweet” on Twitter.
(I’m using the #sxsw tag on my Twitter quips that can be found at Twitter.com/r — or @r.)
SXSW attendees complaining about Twitter reminds me of the appearance of Louis CK on Conan where he mocks the way people will complain about anything — even the most amazing things.
As SXSW is credited with being the event where Twitter first “went viral” two years ago, it’s especially ironic to read that people attending the event are using the clichéd complaint everyone has the first moment they sign on: Do I really care that people are in an elevator? Do I really care where people are going to breakfast? etc.
Terdiman suggests that maybe the Twitter “problem” will be solved by one of the bazillion third-party services or applications or movements that want to be this year’s “Twitter of SXSWi” (which means being the “it girl” Twitter was in 2007). Of course, last year, Twitter was the Twitter of SXSW, when it was used to create a back-channel for attendees to revolt against a self-absorbed individual conducting an interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
And to the disappointment of a parade of this-year’s-Twitter-wannabes, including a company that has a person dressed up as a banana who throws dollar bills off a balcony, Twitter will likely be the Twitter of 2009 SXSWi, as well. Maybe it will be the year when Twitter started to be fixed. And I don’t mean “fixed” by creating the 5,000th startup launched to solve every problem, real or imagined, with Twitter. I mean fixed in a way that only @ev and friends can do.
Or maybe not. Maybe it will be just another year where we get to complain about Twitter while we evangelize its adoption.
As I’ve written before, I use and like Twitter. But I hate hearing about Twitter; like this morning, when I was flipping around the hotel channel selections, and came across Karl Rove giving a how to use Twitter tutorial on Fox News.
I can say with absolute certainty that in two years, whatever that banana is promoting by throwing dollar bills off a balcony will not go so main stream that Karl Rove will be giving lessons on how to use it via the Fox News Channel.
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