metarand

The Intention Web: Social Business Designed

Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group explains the Intention Web as being about information that provides explicit predictions of who will do what next, although it’s not happened yet.

From his perspective, this forward-looking or anticipation network will provide three unique opportunities:

1.People can now use their social relationships that have similar goals or events on a calendar and improve their experience

2. They can also identify who in their social circles are most likely going where, increasing their knowledge of top events

3. This provides businesses with the ability to listen to provide highly contextualized offerings and experiences for those explicitly stating their intents.

As enterprise increasingly integrates social business design principles, I expect them to formulate strategies for tapping into the growing intention network. These strategies will include ways to identify true intent, reward those who broadcast their intent and generally make  this data actionable.

Jeremiah has provided a list of intention enabled sites including:

*  43 Things, a wish list; and

* Plancast, which allows users to publish their future plans.

I want to talk about another intention enabled site called Sponty.  Boston based, the company uses the tagline ‘be hangoutable’ and bills itself as allowing users to create and discover social activity feeds around them. Users create topical feeds that tell others about fun things happening around town, like indie music and hipster parties.

According to co-founder, Mahmoud Arram, Sponty’s premise is that while location is important, the type of the activity and which of your friends are going is the determining factor whether to go to something. Sponty let’s people broadcast their social intentions so that their friends can join them.

He believes the power is in user created topical event feeds. People may be able to tweet events, but tweets are not actionable; in the sense that you cannot click “I’m down” on a tweet to let the organizer/friend know that you’re going and see who else is going.

Mahmoud sees Sponty as being laser focused on events. “Think of it as real-time intentions, rather than real-time statuses”.

He agrees that game mechanics is an essential element and they are exploring ways to build an incentive system for people to share and contribute their topical event feeds. Currently, the top users feel rewarded when they help people go out and discover an event they probably would not have known about otherwise.

Using Twitter as an analogy and stepping back in time 12 to 18 months, it is not hard to see the power within the intention web. Especially for businesses who are able to tap into what will be a growing arena in 2010.

Tags: 43 Things, Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, Plancast, Sponty, Twitter

The New Deconomy: Advertising Under Siege?

Yesterday I mosied around the Sydney ad:tech conference. Being in that wonderfully liberating point of time of seeking my next windmill to tilt at I figured it to be a worthy destination.

My first impression, after factoring in the change of venue from last year, was that it was much subdued. Bearing in mind how photographers see things in capture frames, I spoke with one of the photogs doing the rounds and she had the most wonderful comment which totally summed up the atmosphere.

Her takeout was that she was reticent to take pictures of speakers whilst their slides painted doom and gloom backdrops. She kept finding herself hesitating and waiting for more upbeat slides – which didn’t often materialise.

Last year there was almost a feeling of whimsical discovery – ad execs and marketers in a discovery comfort zone: “tell me again how social media works?”. This year – a totally different picture: “we’ve gotta figure a way to make money from this social media stuff”.

I was also somewhat bemused by the rise of Twitter across the conference consciousness. It was definitely the tech word of the day – much like Google was on everyone’s lips a few years back. Expect a Twitter consultant or two to pop up near you soon. It’s the new SEO in the new Deconomy.

Seriously though, the new epiphany for an industry that is increasingly under pressure, will soon be around engagement and I suspect there to be a panel or more at next year’s event on this topic.

Tags: ad:tech, Advertising, Sydney, Twitter

Mapping Minds: Google Trends Meet Twitter Thoughtstream

Two of the most powerful tools for currently mapping how humanity thinks are Google Trends and Twitter Search.

I whipped up an analysis of Google versus Twitter on Google Trends and the result put Twitter far ahead in our collective consciousness. This is a really useful tool for tracking across a timeline, with clear pointers to inflection points, but it does nothing for point of origin or realtime tracking.

This is where Twitter’s Search function shines. I did an exercise last week in which I tracked a number of key words on Twitter. “jobs” not surprisingly brought up a bunch of results, mainly from job board feeds, “Sydney” alerted me to a number of interesting events taking place in the city, but the clear topic du jour was the “iPhone” – the amount of traffic on Twitter related to this device was enormous.

Imagine if we could mash up these two tools, and extend their reach beyond Twitter’s audience – this would be an extremely powerful way for marketers, politicians and many others to map our minds.

Hattip to Erick Schonfeld for getting me thinking about this.

Tags: Erick Schonfeld, Google, Twitter

Radio Silence: Replaced By The Newsfeed, While Silicon Valley Hums Quietly In The Background

First up, to my regular readers my humble apologies for not blogging for a few weeks. I had a busy month – what do they say about living in interesting times – yip, that is how it has been.

When I have found the time to feed the meter, as it were, I’ve turned to the newsfeeds. Mostly I’ve kept up posts on Facebook and to a lesser degree, Twitter.

I think I am not alone in this shift: blogging less, posting more.

I’m heading back to Sydney this evening for a few weeks and will hopefully have a bit of breathing space to do some more considered posts.

Let’s see how that pans out. If you are in Sydney and would like to meet up please ping me – I look forward to getting a grip on how the tech space has progressed downunder.

I’m also very happy to let you know that despite reports to the contrary, Silicon Valley is alive and well. One of the companies I am advising has gone from zero to term sheet in less than two weeks. I am keen to see more of the same!

Tags: newsfeeds, Twitter

Jason Calacanis: Twitter’s Man In Tehran

Andrew Keen has penned a wonderful post about the follow versus followed aspects of social media, how this proves out the 80/20 or Pareto Rule and the Law of the Vital Few.

Well worth the read.

[via Dennis Howlett, picture courtesy of Lucie Debelkova]

Tags: Iran, Jason Calacanis, Twitter

Google Insights: Search Trends Revealed

Google recently released its Insights product, which Andrew Chen describes as an insanely useful product. If you are a trendfollower or coolhunter then this is absolutely true.

Be warned though, as with many things in life, you get out what you put in – read Eric Schonfeld’s take on inputting “twitter” rather than “twitter.com” for a true representation of the microblogging tool’s US coverage.

Tags: Andrew Chen, Eric Schonfeld, Insights, Twitter

Pingg Party Hots Up With Twitter

New York-based invitation creation and management site, pingg, has expanded its invitation distribution platform to now include Twitter.

Pingg has developed what they call surroundSend technology, which allows a party host to send their custom invitations via email, SMS, print (they will print, stamp and mail for you), the web, social networks and Twitter.

I’m looking forward to giving this service a whirl in Palo Alto soon!

Tags: pingg, Twitter

Twitter Goes In Search, Finds Summize

I’ve been a big fan of Summize, since this Twitter search engine launched a few months ago. Whenever I’ve wanted to get an accurate snapshot of the conversation on the Twitter microblogging service about a brand, company or person I’ve used Summize.

Twitter has now announced that is has acquired Summize in what will transpire to be a mainly stock-based deal, and the Ney York-based Summize team of five will take up roles at Twitter in San Francisco shortly.

Twitter plans to merge the Summize service and API with their own and integrate it under the Twitter brand. It will be interesting to see if this enhances the Twitter experience or detracts from the Summize search function — I’m hoping it’s an improvement all round.

Tags: Summize, Twitter

VentureWrap: Twitter Takes On Amazon

Following on from Twitter‘s $15M Series B funding round at a pre-money of $80M last month, the South Park-based micro-blogging phenomenon has taken on board two further investors.

Joining the already impressive investor lineup of Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage, Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s investment vehicle, Bezos Expeditions, have bought equity in the business.

Spark’s Bijan Sabet will join Twitter’s board and Jeff will no doubt provide invaluable advice around scalability.

In fact, writing on the Twitter blog, Evan Williams points to the vision for the business, and it’s all good:

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust.

Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

Be sure to follow metarand on Twitter!

Tags: Bezos Expeditions, Digital Garage, Evan Williams, Jeff Bezos, Spark Capital, Twitter, Union Square Ventures

The Big Picture: A Vision For Social Media

Imagine a world in which:

every single human being is posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

This is the world that New York-based VC, Fred Wilson, sees within his ‘grand vision‘ for social media.

I applaud Fred’s simplicity. All too often the bigger picture can become obscured by over complication. If we take a look through his firm’s portfolio, we quickly see that he is pulling together a mosaic that will progress us towards achieving his vision:

Twitter – microblogging

Disqus – distributed comments

Oddcast – conversational chararacters

Tumblr – microblogging

Zynga – social gaming

There are a bunch of other companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio, but these are the stand out ventures that speak to Fred’s simple vision.

Turning this vision into reality will take a lot more determined effort by all of us. Besides supporting the right technology pieces, achieving standards (think what Gears is doing for HTML5), and gaining wide user traction there are regulatory and plumbing issues that will need to be solved.

Currently we see a lot of infighting and an almost continuous bitchmeme, at present this seems to be over whether Friendfeed is better than Twitter. And this within the context of a world in which millions are unable to express themselves, a world in which millions are dying because of oppressive regimes.

It is high time the social media industry rallied together. By focusing on this simple end goal, by setting a target we can come together around, we can achieve so much more.

[Picture courtesy of hellomartin]

Tags: disqus, Fred Wilson, oddcast, tumblr, Twitter, Union Square Ventures, Zynga