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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 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
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!
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
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 VenturesImagine 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, ZyngaTwitter database crash notwithstanding - today mark’s a key inflection point.
Michael Arrington took the giant leap forward at about the same time as we landed on Mars. In blogging an empty post about Twitter he took us onto a higher plane: gone is the incessant blogger’s penchant for more words. And judging by the uptake of Seesmic’s embedded video comments plugin in the comments section to Michael’s post, gone too is the obsession with text blogging.
Here’s Duncan Riley’s Blogging 2.0 take:
Tags: Dunca Riley, Michael Arrington, TwitterTwitter is a wonderfully eclectic window into modern life as we near the end of the first decade of this new millenium.
I’ve been collating Twitter posts over the past year that have resonated with me. Posts that scream out “I want to understand the world you see”. Posts that talk to our modern condition: our world of almost complete connectedness, but intense loneliness.
I’ve now mashed this collection up to some music and put it out there. Comments welcome. Where do you fit in?
Stream the mp3:
Stream in Quicktime:
Tags: Music, Social Media, Twitter
Twitter has doubled in size over the past nine months. From one million total users to two million.
What’s really interesting, though, is that it has kept a steady number of active users over this time: 20%.
This is a really high DAU rate and points to a depth of engagement not found, for example on Facebook apps. Most apps on Facebook have a DAU in the 1-2% range [there are exceptions, of course, like the massively mulitplayer game Imperial Galaxy - DAUs have reached as high as 30%].
I’m sure both the rate of growth and the level of engagement are factoring heavily in the current financing round Twitter is going through.
My current favorite Twitter apps:
* Twhirl, an Adobe Air-based Twitter interface, recently acquired by Seesmic;
* Twinkle, an iPhone app that taps into other Twinkle users in a specified radius - great for swarming.
[via Techcrunch, disclosure: I am Chairman of Creative Enclave, the makers of Imperial Galaxy]
Tags: Twhirl, Twinkle, Twitter
I was marinading some chicken this morning in one of my favorite mixes (there’s a good food franchise in there), when it dawned on me - as social beings, we have an innate desire and need for feedback and feeling like we are part of a community.
This is one of the reasons I love cooking so much. As a creative I not only get to produce something way better than its individual parts, but I have instant gratification through a viral feedback loop - the people I am cooking for. I don’t get any joy cooking for myself, love cooking for my family and adore doing big dinners (circa 16 guests) — the bigger the echochamber in this instance - the more gratification potential.
However there is a tipping point — pulling together a meal for a group larger than that and it becomes more of a painful logistics exercise than fun. I believe this is also due to the fact that there is a law of diminishing returns at work here as well — the more people who tell me they loved my portugese-southern african, peri peri chicken the less of an impact this will have.
And so it is with blogging. I remember hacking together my own blog back in 1998 (I think the term then was “zine”) and really enjoying getting my voice out into the nascent blogosphere. But I also found it somewhat disparaging when I received minimal feedback. This prompted me to find other ways of connecting with my potential audience and I set up a number of online groups that morphed into a collective think tank.
Spurred on by the depth of engagement and reinforcing feedback I was receiving, I got involved with one of the first social networking phenomena to achieve scale: First Tuesday. But that’s a story for another day.
Fast forward to 2003, when blogging started to get real traction. Why did it take off? Essentially, the blogosphere had achieved sufficient critical mass to become an effective echo chamber.
Blogging software promoted interaction through comments, trackbacks and more recently leaderboards (instant viral feedback loops) like Digg and today’s Techmeme. We continue to see innovation in this area, for example you can video comment on this post via a Seesmic plugin.
Let’s helicopter out a bit. The blogosphere as echo chamber seems to work best within niche areas. The early adopter, tech geek set is a classic example. A relatively small, but vocal group, geeks are highly adept at creating reverberating conversations and memes. The same cannot be said for all niche groupings, but as a general rule: niche promotes echo.
Before this becomes a missive, let’s now zero in on the miniblogosphere and in particular the tool that has ignited this space, Twitter. It works because it is an even more effective echo chamber than the broader blogosphere. And it comes as no surprise that is has achieved exponential growth within the tech geek grouping. Twitter is the perfect storm for geeks. Twitter is a double wave instant viral loop - tweet quick, achieve nanoinstant feedback.
This miniblogging tool is also being used as an echo chamber funnel by the geek community. Blog posts are promoted to a tight knit group of followers through a tweet that, if picked up, is pushed out more broadly.
Conferences can also form effective echo chambers provided they are focused. Perhaps this is why the Web 2.0 Expo, which took place in San Francisco this past week receives mixed views. Personally I find its coverage too broad, preferring instead to participate in the Web 2.0 Summit where I know the quality of the noise echoing around me is higher.
Finally, social networks would do well to look at how they can create more effective echo chambers, both at a macro cross network and micro level. For example, groups are a common feature on social networks - Facebook groups have not been particuarly effective. Why - they are a very poor echo chamber. There is limited ability to create conversation through them.
Contrast this to Ning’s roll your own social network - each micro network has the ability to become a micro echo chamber for a niche that its creator will promote to his or her personal network.
Time to bbq that chicken…bon appetit!
[Photo courtesty of jolou]
Tags: blog, Echo chamber, Facebook, Ning, Twitter, viral loop