AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

josh_wills: @Scobleizer I see you tweeting about lists alot, but I don't see that you get why it's important. hint: it's not the filtering.

about 12 hours later from web · Reply · View Tweet

Scobleizer: @josh_wills OK, you hooked me. What's important about lists in your view?

2 minutes later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer they're hyperlinks w/anchor text. Anchor text is *really* important for search.

1 minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer twitter democratized publishing. Now they've democratized linking. Real-time linking for anyone = Better RT search.

less than a minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer bloggers begging for lists == bloggers begging for links.

half a minute later from web · Reply · View Tweet

josh_wills: @Scobleizer good article. I bet twitter's (eventual) pro accounts will let you create more than 20 lists.

I realized only tonight that Twitter had made List names into clickable links inside of tweets when I came across a Mashable tweet that included "@mashable/mashable". I immediately went searching for when this was first discovered, Scobel had a tweet about it from Friday afternoon which I had missed before.

Here is a Twitter Search for the phrase:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%22link+to+lists%22

Since there is no way to search Twitter with full REGEX there is likely no way to search for the first tweet using the new convention (with something like @[^/]/[^ ] ).

More than likely it would have come from one of Twitter's developers. But at least neither @twitter, @ev, or @biz had anything about this convention in the last 9 days.

The points made by @josh_willis could indeed be huge. The entire Twitter ecosystem has suddenly changed, and we likely haven't thought of all the consequences yet.

(Also see: "Why Twitter Lists Change Everything - Dave Troy" http://bit.ly/4bm3ke )

Can Microsoft just once think for itself and INNOVATE something? Really, I say that as an embarrassed MSFT customer.

And yes, the source of this article is Apple Fanboy biased, but that doesn't matter. The obviousness of this is way beyond all denying...

CMOs admitted they were losing power to the empowered consumer. A few years ago, the conversation may have been one of resistance, argument or fear of these changes. Yet this group had moved on, accepted the changes, and had already put into place programs to benefit from market changes. I liked Greg Walsh’s [...] analogy that previously marketers were used to ‘Bowling’, where marketers could easily throw a message down the aisle and hit the pins with great confidence. Now [...] it was more like ‘Pinball’ where a marketer could load the message up, shoot it out, but have no idea where it will end up.

Social was on the lips of nearly everyone. [...] This wasn’t the usual social rhetoric of the 101 questions, but the overall group asked sophisticated questions around the change in influence, reputation management, and integration with existing programs. For example, the Ritz, has already woven in social to their experience, each hotel manager spend over an hour reviewing the online conversation (even Tweets) at their location before walking the grounds each morning.

Social is difficult to measure – yet marketers know they must be there. [...] “Over 70% of the CMOs polled will do more in the social space this coming year”. Yet, when asked “How do you measure success?” there wasn’t a clear answer, it’s still baffling. [...] Similar to the difficulties measuring analog marketing, they’re ok with not being able to measure everything in social – they now see the value.

Beyond monitoring, insight from the social sphere is untapped. Social media monitoring is just the first baby step, most companies haven’t tapped into what the data actually means.[...]

My BOLD highlights.

This is a great "finger on the pulse" piece by @JOwyang showing how quickly corporate attitudes are changing in this new landscape. It sure feels like these folks were light-years ahead of Old Media, which still largely appears firmly lodged in a place between defiance and denial...

[ See e.g. "Why the Media Is Taking So Long to Die" http://bit.ly/3A8BEO

Also, if you haven't read it yet, my recent post:

11. Don't Worry about Competitors

When you think you've got a great idea, it's sort of like having a guilty conscience about something. All someone has to do is look at you funny, and you think "Oh my God, they know."

These alarms are almost always false:

Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first glance usually never were when you really looked at it. Even if they were operating in the same area, they had a different goal.

One reason people overreact to competitors is that they overvalue ideas. If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same idea would be a real threat. But it's usually execution that matters:

All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later. It always comes down to your own product and approach to the market.

My BOLD highlights.

Worrying about competition (on genuinely new ideas) will only slow you down. Competitive analysis only matters in established markets, but then the Law of Category Leadership / First Mover Advantage should tell you not to want to get into established markets in the first place.

Instead, create a whole new category. If you create something that is 10 TIMES better than what is currently being offered, you almost by definition have created a new category. Example: The iPhone created a whole new category of phone (yes, it has plenty of flaws, but that is not the point). The iPhone "competitors" are still scrambling to catch up.

Newsflash: They will never catch up, unless they themselves innovate and go for 10X better to create another new category.

What will the impact be of this new feature?

1. You'll follow a lot more people. Why? Because you'll find someone who has done a really great list, say, of programmers, and you'll add the whole list. I've already done this a LOT and found that Twitter has gotten way more interesting because of it.
2. You will spend a lot of time managing lists, at least at first. I went through that over on FriendFeed, which has a similar feature (Twitter's implementation is better, by the way).
3. I can see a raft of new searching and discovery mechanisms. Already I've been invited to the beta test of a new directory service. Which brings me to the next point.
4. Directories based on numbers of followers are dead. Yes, Wefollow, I'm looking at you.
5. Anything to do with numbers of followers is now dead. WHAT KIND OF LISTS you are on will be far more important. Who cares if someone has 145,000 followers if no one will put him on a list because they don't like his Tweet style?
6. Follow Friday is dead. Lists are FAR superior.
7. Twitter will have scaling problems almost immediately due to these lists because lots of people will start using Twitter more again.

Some interesting points here, I especially agree with the idea that Lists with proper keywords in the list name will confer more authority down the road than raw follower numbers. It's a bit like anchor text of incoming links counting for a lot in Google's rankings.

I would add:

1) The creation of larger lists is currently still very cumbersome b/c we can't search over our following/followers lists by Bio or "recent tweets" keyword's to select people to add. This has been a missing feature in Twitter since well before the arrival of the new Lists of course.

2) So far, I can't see a way to get a newly minted List stream out of Twitter in any way, as there is no RSS feed link (or similar) for it. Since there is also no "List:" operator in Twitter Search yet, you really have no way to see the stream output from a given list beyond clicking on those cumbersome "more" bars. Ugh...

3) There should be an option to add the output stream of a given list to one's "home" (or similar combined) stream (in effect a lists of lists). This would allow you to listen to a large number of of users almost instantly by simply selecting e.g. 6 lists on your favorite topic. You could then later still individually follow some or most of those users as you saw fit, or "mute" some by blocking.

(Oops, just tested this and it looks like your blocks so far don't filter out that user from a given List's stream. Let's hope Twitter adds this soon. This is still one of the most powerful features of FriendFeed: I can join a Group, similar to the new Twitter Lists, and if any users in that Group spam its stream repeatedly, blocking that user will remove them from my view of the Group's stream.)

And since there is no follow-spamming involved with lists (the users on the list never get informed that you followed the list they were on), there is really no reason for Twitter to put overly strict limitations on how many users you can follow this way. Why should you be prevented from listening to a large number (this is already what I've been doing on FriendFeed, where the follower/following ratio limitations don't exist)?

NOW, if you could then pipe an RSS output of such a home feed into FriendFeed to search over there, or at least could search by keyword over your own "home" stream, then you'd really have something useful.

You and your ilk are like the monks of Gutenberg's time. You have been sole owners of the knowledge and tools for so long, you feel it is a natural state and are blind to the fact that you are not God's special flowers. Your way is not the only way and it is no longer the right way. What's more, you might not even have a place in the new way.

It turns out that what you do isn't that special at all. You're being replaced by economies of scale and "amateurs." Amateurs who can do your job better and cheaper. Because we care. Because we have the time, and because there are just so damned many of us.

This is a very interesting point about blind-spots. Even though I didn't like the name-calling tone of the rest of this comment, this point is well taken.

The original post by Jason Pontin, though a few months old, is still a very thorough (and for the most part balanced) overview of the structural problems besetting Old Media. Definitely worth clicking through and reading.

But in the end I must agree with the commenter here that the "tweaking" solutions Potin proposes will not be the answer. Only true innovation, i.e. the creation of something new and better can "save media". Think "10 TIMES better, not 10% better".

I wrote this week on another media mogul in deep denial, Rupert Murdoch and his Pay-Wall pipe dreams:

Alex Schleber said...

Sadly, I have to agree with Robert's assessment here. And he's right that the tech conversation on FF has pretty much gone dead, although he has contributed to this through his own absence. If nothing else it shows how quickly the tides of conversation momentum can change.

What NO ONE is talking about is Twitter's persistence issue, and how FriendFeed is still pretty much the only solution to this problem:

Twitter is more or less actively withholding from you both your own tweets, as well as the tweets of your "with friends" following stream. Once it's passed by, and 7 days or so have passed, there is no way for you to get these tweets back out.

Now when it comes to the Twitter Firehose stream, that is somewhat understandable, since Twitter wants to sell it expensively to corporate data miners. But when it comes to your own stuff (including tweets from the people you may have spent a long time collecting into your "following"), you are out of luck. You can't even get it back by any kind of search natively (if you use Twitter Search, you will get the results mostly polluted by people you hadn't chosen to follow).

You probably wouldn't accept this from just about any other service that you are putting so much of your time and energy into. And none of the Twitter clients I've seen really resolve this issue, since they don't store the incoming tweets persistently (e.g. if TweetDeck crashes, the old stuff disappears, and is is generally not designed - yet - to create persistence/archiving).

Now FriendFeed has been the only relatively decent solution to this up to this point, except for the fact that it was overly hard to get ALL of one's following/friends imported (anyone not on FF already you have to import manually).

Robert has been getting some persistence (besides using FF) from using Twitter's much overlooked (b/c ill-designed) Favorites feature (along with Favestar.fm to collect them), and while his finds are much appreciated, this just isn't really practical for most. We can't all be monitoring the stream 24/7 like Robert is :)

What is much more useful is if you can search back over your Following's output ALL THE WAY BACK if necessary and see what they've said e.g. about the recent FTC vs. Bloggers brouhaha. Simple to do on FriendFeed, nearly impossible on Twitter.

Of course now we can't be sure if FF is going to be around long enough to continue to wholeheartedly recommend them as an option to solve this. I've never understood why the FF didn't play up this angle aggressively, they could have signed up tons of Twitter users on the archiving alone, and in due time people would have considered more of the other advantages of FF.

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform "miracles" -- things which violate the perceived rules.

Hacking is most commonly associated with computers, and people who break into or otherwise subvert computer systems are often called hackers. Although this terminology is occasionally disputed, I think it is essentially correct -- these hackers are discovering the actual rules of the computer systems (e.g. buffer overflows), and using them to circumvent the intended rules of the system (typically access controls).

...
Important new businesses are usually some kind of hack. The established businesses think they understand the system and have setup rules to guard their profits and prevent real competition. New businesses must find a gap in the rules -- something that the established powers either don't see, or don't perceive as important.

That was certainly the case with Google: the existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn't very important (regular people can't tell the difference), and that search wasn't very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google's success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.

In fact, the entire process of building a business and having other people and computers do the work for you is a big hack. Nobody ever created a billion dollars through direct physical labor [...]

Not everyone has the hacker mindset (society requires a variety of personalities), but wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth. Some of those people were content to simply find a truth, but others used their discoveries to hack the system, to transform the world. These are the people that created the governments, businesses, religions, and other machines that operate our society, and they necessarily did it by hacking the prior systems (consider the challenge of establishing a successful new government or religion -- the incumbents won't give up easily).

My BOLD highlights.

This is a great metaphor to think about all systems in life, by all means click through to read the rest of this great post. Before you do, read the above passages again.

From NLP: Whoever has the greatest amout of flexibility of respone within a given system will ultimately control that system. -> Have maximum flexibility of response.

Alex Schleber says:

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October 13, 2009 at 4:44 pm

FriendFeed is still the best solution to archive one’s Twitter stream (including any imported Twitter “following”) and have it be searchable. Twitter’s “7 days back” search is of course a joke, and FF fills that void. Same for the lack of lists that FF will supply in PERSISTENT ways (unlike Tweetdeck etc. where all of that data eventually disappears again, and the search tools are very limited).

Is it important to have access to all of the links (i.e. “alternative bookmarks”) that we all have so enthusiastically “meta-tagged” in our Twitter streams? Of course. The fact that I can’t search at least my own tweets on Twitter all the way back is shocking…

Is it useful to be able to search back-data on e.g. my Branding group, my Coaching group, etc. Of course. And nothing else yet allows this.

That said, FF never made it easy enough to mass-import Twitter friends not already registered on FF, adding individual ones manually has been far too tedious. And of course we dont’ know if Zuckerberg will ultimately let the service survive. Let’s pray that at least the archive will always stay available.