AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

Tweet Nirvana

Anyone else find it ironic that Twitter is crashing hard today, as the #140tc Twitter Conference 2009 is happening. Perhaps Twitter's API lead should have stayed at the helm today... "Give her all shes got Scotty!"... "She cant take much more captain... ah..."

Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.

In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many.

...

Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from Ad Age or FastCompany?

This is completely key, I have argued in the past that current ad serving/targeting models are a complete WASTE: Once you have the attention (the most valuable/scarce resource on this info economy) through your content, don't give it away for poorly targeted ad (Adsense, etc.) peanuts.

Sell people stuff that makes sense in the context of the (free) info they just viewed/read. How can you get more targeted than that? Google search queries are based on a few words, NOT a few dozen interlinked context keywords to be found in an article.

Make it cheap enough (somewhere between free and impulse purchase), and keep it in line with the content delivery vehicle, e.g. with articles, sell more information, with video, sell more video/DVDs, etc.

Here is more detail from a while back:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/is-advertising-failing-on-the-internet

The bottom line is that whoever acquires Twitter will in essence take possession of an army of millions (soon to be tens of millions) of humans who are actively, accurately, and enthusiastically meta-tagging pages. In the arena of human-augmented search, Mahalo is a useful wheelbarrow, while Twitter is a fleet of 747 cargo planes. The search engine that integrates Twitter data properly will likely become recognized as the “best” search engine out there.

I've been saying this kind of thing for months as well. Great metaphor, and by all means click through to read the whole post.

The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says.

“The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. [...] In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

I find that when folks share stories, links, photos and videos on Facebook, a majority of them are useful. The idea of social shame acts as a a way to share better to overcome the problem of plenty that comes with the rapid growth of the Internet. Sharing better means a higher likelihood that people will actually visit the links being shared on their social networks.

May 22, 2009

Alex Schleber said...

Sachin,

I love you guys, but please don't make the mistake of expecting that other people (including tech bloggers, etc.) will automatically get everything about what you guys are doing.

This is called "The Curse of Knowledge": We tend to make assumptions from our own informed/involved state about what other people will understand about the topic we ourselves are expert in (as in your own service that you guys have created from scratch, your baby so to speak).

Rule of Branding 101: YOU need to actively communicate to people what you want them to think about your brand/product. Assume nothing. Obviously, there will still be plenty of room for people thinking in unforseen and surprising ways, but the core message needs to come from YOU.

(I.e. send Mashable et al. well-crafted PR/branding releases about new features and the intended use cases/benefits behind them. Again, assume nothing. Make it super EASY for them to spread a message designed by you.)

If you want to delve into the "curse of knowledge" problem a bit more, read the chapter from "Made to Stick" if you haven't already.

All that said, where is my Posterous custom CSS and sidebar feature? :) Cheers!

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention.

...

Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” For Gallagher, everything comes down to that one big choice: investing your attention wisely or not.

Now you'll know who to knowingly quote when you talk about attention being the only scarce resource in this information economy...

Great, though longish article, read it in full if you can focus your attention long enough :) Click through.

Last year I wrote a blog post entitled “If the news is important it will find me”. The point was that we all live in so many social networks, that someone will send us an update if something in the world happens that we would be interested in.  Back then I was guessing.  A year later I have data.

For the 1st time ever, more people are finding my blog from Twitter and Facebook referrals than via Google.  The total number of people coming to my blog is increasing. The percentage of people who find it via Google is declining. Significantly.

Thats huge. Why ? Because of the behavior implications for users, and because of the business implications for Twitter, Facebook and Google.

And Google is recognizing this and trying to fight back with the new "Search Options" view that can push recency ("24 hours") to the top of the results. Question is, will that be enough to halt the erosion?

Or is it a foregone conclusion that Google must buy Twitter to preempt Microsoft or anyone else (incl. an independent Twitter) from dominating this new world of "real-time" search?

And what of the possible anti-trust issues that Microsoft could agitate for?

Does Microsoft understand that this may well be its last chance to disrupt Google's search dominance? Because recent ComScore, etc. data shows that even the widely anticipated MSFT-Yahoo search deal would do little to halt the decline in share or materially change the permanent 2nd/3rd place status.

Now if MSFT could pull off getting the Yahoo deal AND buying Twitter in short order...

Designing new products and services, and adding new features to existing ones, is very difficult to do in public, especially when you are trying to walk the fine line of placating existing users while attracting new ones. Twitter, in a flash point of popularity, is especially vulnerable due to the fact their own product, as also are Digg and Facebook, could be used by users to fight back. Did Twitter or Facebook or Digg lose users permanently due to such heated battles? Probably not for long, but the scars do linger, and the trust factor that might once have been there is gone, or at least damaged enough that the mob will keep their torches at the ready, waiting for the next time they're needed.

The world of product development, on the backs of user content, is changing the way people expect to participate. And when they aren't treated as equals, or they are talked down to, people are taking it very seriously, and there are more platforms for conversation than ever, with more people to reach than ever, so any service who is in this space who expects to make even "small settings updates" should strongly think of their potential impact and be ready in case things start to go wrong - fast.

My BOLD highlights. Compare what I wrote here a little while ago about the platforms themselves being the perfect soapboxes for user unrest:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/social-media-lessons-controversy-erupts-surrounding-facebooks-twitterization-redesign

Product Design Flaws

Since last year we've been hearing from users and having discussions about removing this setting—feedback indicated that it was useful but also created confusion. People would change the setting and then not understand why their timeline had fragments of conversations. From the tweet author perspective, there was an unclear expectation as to who would actually see messages ****which often lead to trepidation when it came to using replies.**** Finally, even folks who understood the setting would ****complain that they couldn't follow accounts with a high volume of replies because the replies overwhelmed their timeline.**** It was becoming apparent that we had an opportunity for improvement.

Technical Problems

Even though only 3% of all Twitter accounts ever changed this setting away from the default, it was causing a strain and impacting other parts of the system. Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their followers' reply setting was and then manifest that tweet accordingly in their timeline— ****this was the most expensive work the database was doing and it was causing other features to degrade**** which lead to SMS delays, inconsistencies in following, fluctuations in direct message counts, and more. Ideally, we would redesign and rebuild this feature but there was no time, hence the sudden deploy.

Hopefully, this clears things up a bit...

My **** highlights.

My response in one word: baloney. This "less hasty", presumably more measured explanation by @Biz of the #fixreplies issue, is still just as Orwellian, if not more so (it's trying to kick the propaganda into another gear, since the first round was so pathetically obvious).

Something like, "we should have listened better, but let me give you a dozen (dubious yet plausible sounding) reasons for why we didn't listen, didn't elicit feedback beforehand, and still won't listen in a meaningful way."

The excerpt shows two things: The tortured logic of why the old option was "a flaw" (rather than an OPTION) continues, and I highlighted the two items that stand out to me as particularly ridiculous ("trepidation about visibility" and "volume complaints"):

While there may have been some feedback about these, no statistics on the number of such complaints was given vs. the number of users who were perfectly happy with the OPTION.

(BTW, since we are TOLD that a "mere" 3% of users ever had the option turned on, how do we know that this number is accurate? From the vocal response under the #fixreplies hashtag, I could easily see it be higher, but I guess we'll have to believe them. Their behavior in this doesn't exactly inspire confidence.)

Secondly, @Biz seems to make the case that it was the additional database lookups due to the setting that made abandoning the option necessary (without notice). Sounds plausible enough, except that the continued filtering based on the question "is XYZuser following both sender AND receiver of this tweet?" itself ads 50% more database lookups from the start.

Stands to reason that NOT filtering out any @ replies would save this extra step on each tweet (even though it would increase volume a bit, but only when people were actually requesting/looking at their "with friends" stream). Which would seem much more in keeping with the open architecture and spirit of Twitter.

Give us all of the data, and then we can filter down from there. My guess is of the default setting had been "show all @ replies", then 90%+ of users would have happily left it there. After following more than about 100 committed, active Tweeters, it generally becomes about serendipity and personal filtering methods anyway.

Why exclude a whole class of tweets, just because we weren't already following one side of the conversation (this isn't Facebook's Walled Garden after all). THAT is not what will somehow save one from "tweet overload" (letting go of the guilt around feeling like you have to read every single incoming tweet might however).

The original default setting never made much sense to me (we do already have DMs for private conversation), and the new half-baked compromise "solution" is no better.

The only decent workaround I see for now is to prefix @ replies you do want your followers to see with something, like "Hey @xyz..." or "#fix @xyz", while the addressee will still presumably get the tweet due to the (excellent) new @ "mentions" tab feature. Only thing is, the "in reply to" link and threading will be gone.

Rather than taking things away, Twitter should be adding more intelligent conversation threading right in the Twitter Web interface, e.g. the way it is already being handled in Twitter Search (if you haven't tried/seen it there, do a search on Search.twitter.com - the search integration on Twitter itself does not have this yet - and look for "Show Conversation" links on tweets).

Which brings up one last point: If conversations are (OK to be) visible on Twitter Search, why not on Twitter itself?