I hate to add another Twitter post to the increasingly growing pile of Tweets, but it seems like there’s a certain behavior emerging from this new microverse worth commenting on. If you’re not sure what Twitter is, well, I’m not even going to address that problem.

There are basically 3 kinds of posts that are emerging relating to Twitter:

• Twitter sucks
• Twitter rules
• I rule Twitter

So let’s look at some of the commentary out there, it’s interesting, to say the least.

Twitter Sucks
There’s some commentary out there that truly begs the question, “What’s so fascinating about Twitter?” My favorite post on this topic was written by good friend, Chris Heuer. Of course, Chris’ post is not really about how Twitter must die, just that it very well could.

The thing about Twitter, Flickr and other similarly architected services is that we like staying in touch with the people we care about, the people we WANT to have connecttions with. Unfortunately, and as I have been saying a lot lately - Humans Don’t Scale. Dunbar was really right - I am pretty much putting the Dunbar number in the same category as Newton’s laws of gravity. It is important to note that I am not hoping for its demise - far from it. I am however wondering what can be done about those of us that care about such things in thinking about some sort of guideliness to prevent usage patterns from destroying the incredible value we find in staying connected to the people we care about most.

Source: Social Media Club, “Is SxSW going to be the death of Twitter?”

Pete Cashmore’s post is just too good to pass up as well:

To some, it really feels like Twitter has stumbled upon a new blogging paradigm - short, to-the-point messages that let your friends, family and the world know exactly where you are and what you’re doing, every second of the day.

But others are asking: what’s the point? Those people just don’t get it. Clearly, Twitter is an amazing new way to blog about your cat.

Source: Mashable, “The Evolution of Blogging, Cat Version”

And let’s not forget this post tagged “annoying”:

If I ever catch me using Twitter please shoot me on the spot. I feel sick that Twitter has become popular enough that I found a need to even cover the service but the 18-25 crowd (and younger) is embracing Twitter and it is common knowledge that this group can drive sales and trends through the roof.

Twitter is yet one more example of a world obsessed with information and a constant need to be instantly gratified. I think it perfectly characterizes the excesses that American’s have come to expect in everyday life. I prefer old technologies like Caller-ID because it is actually useful — I can decided who I allow into my life.

Source: jemmille.com, “What the F*%k is Twitter?”

Emerging Thoughts: Quite a bit of Twitter seems to be very extraneous - more noise than signal. Of course, we’re increasingly able to distill value from social noise but Twitter still lacks some of the required controls to serve us best.

Twitter Rules
Naturally, good and evil must be seemingly balanced in the universe which is why we have a league of supporters for Twitter. Interestingly, many of the people who are supporting it don’t necessarily rationalize the success of the system either.

Tara Hunt “defends” her initial love and use of Twitter:

There are many more reasons why I love Twitter and Twittering. I love the common language emerging from this less than 140 character medium. That people come up with clever words to describe Twitter phenomenon, which become a shared language between us.

I feel so strongly about it that it upsets me to see people reduce it to another friend collecting service or hype. It is compelling, interesting and captures the imagination of alot of people. Tell me other web apps these days that can say the same. It goes to show you, once again, that simple tools that disrupt are what we need to be concentrating on…not more ‘me too’ and ‘this will make me $$’. Sure, it’s human nature to dismiss something (or someone) gaining in popularity. Is it jealousy? Fear? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t self-reflective.

Source: HorsePigCow, “Twits Twittering for the sake of Tweets: or that’s not why I twitter”

Steve Rubel gives an interesting take on this - drawing comparisons to Moore’s Law, amongst other things:

That brings me back to Twitter. Despite it’s lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It’s brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my “followers” (as they call it). If things have seemed a little quieter over here, it’s because I have been busier over there. (Here’s my Twitter feed)

Source: MicroPersuasion, “Twitter, Human Attention and Moore’s Law”

Scott Karp adds in his usual, considered post - carrying the torch from Steve’s post:

I think Twitter is a well-executed application, which, like all technologies, is only good or bad in how it is used. What strikes me about Twitter is that it appears to be accentuating the natural exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies of avid blog writers and readers. While blog posts have traditionally been short, Twitter pushes this trend to the extreme, accentuating the attention deficit disorder that the web naturally fosters.

Source: The Blog Herald, “Twitter Lowers The Bar For Blogging”

Emerging Thoughts: Twitter fills an important gap in our lifestyle and behavior. As more and more people are drawn to the power of personal publishing, Twitter is creating a more gradual onramp for newcomers while keeping otherwise established participants engaged.

I Rule Twitter
This last category, I’m not going to link to. Sam Sethi has a good rundown on just what’s happening. However, there is a recent rage, especially in light of the newest gizmo, Twitterholic.com. It seems there is outright competition to see who can get the most followers, friends, tweets and everything else in between.

The more and more I thought about this, the more and more it reminded me of MySpace. In that world, we’re mere mortals, in Twitter, we’re gods - at least for now ;) Turns out that I am not alone in this thinking. Min Jung Kim chimes in with a quite funny Haiku:

twitter defined as
turning bunches of geeks to
14 year old girls.

danah boyd also adds her observations as well:

I think it’s funny to watch my tech geek friends adopt a social tech. They can’t imagine life without their fingers attached to a keyboard or where they didn’t have all-you-can-eat phone plans. More importantly, the vast majority of their friends are tech geeks too. And their social world is relatively structurally continuous. For most 20/30-somethings, this isn’t so. Work and social are generally separated and there are different friend groups that must be balanced in different ways.

Source: apophenia, “Tweet Tweet (some thoughts on Twitter)”

Emerging Thoughts: I think that it’s all interesting. The point I was trying to make is that all new and exciting tools often require context to grasp their impact on things. At this point in time, we’re not quite sure what Twitter will become - if anything more than a passing fad. For sure, many people are asking great questions, participating in the change, and adjusting their goggles.

Technorati Tags: chris+heuer, minjungkim, puppy, scott+karp, social+networking, steve+rubel, twitter

Back when I was wading through the underbelly of the conference business, I had the opportunity to meet so many different individuals from walks of life generally foreign to the likes of people like me. These people were all supporters of the actual events we attended - from the sales people to the support staff, an entire ecosystem exists.

One of the more interesting finds - though not entirely surprising - was the belief that the content was the driving force behind attendance. In some circles, this stripped down even further into direct “buyer-seller” events where people literally did the speed dating thing to find sales and opportunities - but I digress. My point then, and still now, is that conferences are more about the contacts than the content. By my gross estimation, I peg it at an 80-20 split (good round numbers).

It’s referred to as many different things: the hallway track, the backchannel, or, if you like the old-fashioned lingo, “networking”. Kathy Sierra today makes a wonderful post regarding this very phenomena:

The point is, face-to-face still matters. And in fact all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y’all are building, we now have more far-flung friends–including people we’ve never met f2f–than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Source: Creating Passionate Users, “Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video…”

Technorati Tags: conferences, kathy+sierra, events, syncpeople

I thought this line was almost comical:

Adoption of social marketing tactics stems from the discovery “30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, but only 10 percent trust an advertisement,” said Emily Riley, JupiterResearch analyst and lead author of the report.

Source: ClickZ, “Marketers Increasingly Use Social Networking Sites”

This article discusses a recent JupiterResearch report on the uptake of marketing as a channel for brand marketers (48% to be precise).

What surprises me is that this revelation should not be new. Since the beginning of commerce, we’ve relied on our relationships as the primary filter for transactions of all sorts. As we increasingly use technology as a filter, it’s amazing how simple facts can seem to get buried - like the fact that we trust our friends.

Of course, what I do find more interesting is the shift in mindset. I doubt that most companies have gotten “edgier” in recent months, spawning their interest in using these sites. Instead, it might be more likely that the undeniable fact that these sites have become destinations for many different types of individuals and that the messaging and culture within that micro-community is indeed normalized. Put another way, perhaps it’s not so scary down in the muck.

Technorati Tags: brand+marketing, jupiter+research, reputation, social+networking

Excuse the very late notice for this - the budget for Podcamp West ended up having more room than we anticipated and we wanted to do something fun to kick off the festivities.

Yesterday, Vic Podcaster, Brian Solis, and I baked the plan to have a small pre-party on Friday, November 17.  We’re going to The Mint, just a block or two away from the camp venue to have several pitchers of beer as well as some finger food.  Things will get started at 6:30pm and continue on until at least 8:30pm.

In case you don’t remember, this is the same spot that Vloggercon ended at.

Please RSVP here so we can tell how to prepare best to serve you ;)
http://upcoming.org/event/127408

On Friday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a pre-event briefing for Yahoo!  The event in question – Yahoo! Open Hack Day.  If you have not yet heard about the event, here are the essential details:

Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2006
Location: Yahoo! Headquarters
Start Date: Friday, September 29, 5pm
End Date: Saturday, September 30, 6pm
http://hackday.org

Essentially, Open Hack Day is an opportunity for developers, mashers and interested spectators to jump in and have a chance to work on their own hacks using the extensive Yahoo! APIs as well as their own creative secret sauce.  Expect 100 or more Yahoos to be on campus wearing special t-shirts or hats that guide you to their expertise.

The event is structured as a coding/camping event – taking its roots from Bar Camp and Foo Camp.  There will be great food, lots of drinks, and “unbelievably awesome entertainment” – read a secret band that fits the groove of the whole hack culture.

There’s 3 simple rules for participation:

1. Build something that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day
2. At the end of the day, we will celebrate what you’ve done on Hack Day with demos of hacks and awards for the coolest ones.  “Judging is just the respect of your peers,” says Brad Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy.
3. Do your demo FAST! (under two minutes)

You can find out more at the URL above.  They’re expecting close to 500 people in total so I imagine it’s a great time in the making.  As Chad Dickerson noted, “Hack Day has turned into a celebration of what people are doing all the time.”

More importantly, though, it seems worth mentioning how important the concept of Hack is at Yahoo!  Most of the presentation we saw was actually about the manner in which this subversive behavior is infiltrating at least one part of Yahoo!  Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy, said it best:

“they’re totally buying in.  I have tried to get fired for the last 2 years…  This is not lip service at all.  The reason we’re doing this, to be clear, … we believe this is actually good for business.  We’re not doing this as a community service.  We’re not doing this as a stunt.  We believe this is critical to the future of Yahoo!”

If anything was clear – they take this all very serious, but they’re having a great time as well.

More coverage can be seen here:

• TechCrunch
• TalkCrunch
• Scobelizer

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with Chris Brogan about PodCamp. Steve Garfield initially connected me to Chris after I added my name to the PodCamp roster. It took a week or so for us to connect, but I am glad we did. Chris has the excitement I love to see in people - the stuff you just can’t buy.

Towards the end of the conversation, I mentioned that I was planning on tossing my card into the sponsorship hat since we fully believe in and support the podcasting community. At that moment, something crossed my mind. On the Wiki, Chris mentioned that everyone should bring their business cards with them so they could network. I’m no stranger to networking, as most who’ve met me know. What I realized is that despite that warning from Chris, most people still would forget or not make arrangements.

That’s when I had my Eureka! moment. As I told Chris, SocialRoots is in the business of helping social media creators build their own businesses. My idea was simple: why don’t we sponsor business cards for those folks. After all, your business card is the real-world gateway to your business, right? After a bit of research into how I might pull this off (I’ve had some experience designing these sorts of things before and it’s not fun), I came up with what I hope will be a workable solution - but everything’s a prototype until it’s not.

So the arrangement is simple. I’ve designed 4 different business card blanks. They’re bright, happy, and leave enough space for a clear label that will hold 3 lines of text (Your Name, Your URL, Your E-mail or Phone). 4000 blanks arrived at Chris’ house - along with a laser printer since I don’t own a printer that works. Ironically enough, I got them printed at Vistaprint - the originators of this sponsored business card concept if I ever knew of one. The labels are tucked away in my bag here so hopefully everything makes it there intact.

Throughout Podcamp, I’ll be joyfully waiting for anyone that is missing their own business card. Once you’ve told me what you want on your card, I’ll run you some labels and you can choose whichever combination of the blanks you want to use. Stick em on and you’re good to go. I just hope that I don’t run out.. the list grew to 300+ registrants. Looks like 10 cards per person per visit.

BTW, the back of the cards contain room for notes and our cute little mascot - reminding you that we love you.

If you’ve got a conference coming up that’s up our alley - let us know, maybe we’ll tug all the gear out to your event too.

Which one do you like? My votes on pink!

I’ve been listening to the Startup Success 2006 video for the last 45 minutes and it’s really a great listen for anyone in startup land.  One particular bit by Joe Kraus of JotSpot.  He’s talking about James Stockdale, a war verteran apparently held as a prisoner of war longer than anyone else:

“You can never stop believing that what you are doing is going to be the most successful thing you can make it.  But every day you have to face the hard, cold reality of what’s right in front of you.  And you can’t let your sense of optimism force you into denial about the facts on the ground.”

I’ve been having more reality to deal with lately than I would prefer :)  but what can you do.  We’ve reached on of these impasses at the moment.  We’ve been gearing up for a launch in the next 10 days - it was supposed to happen this week but we had some serious setbacks with design (it’s moving along swimmingly now).

Unfortunately, you’ve got to listen to your team as well.  Last night I had a conversation with my lead developer on Product 1 (soon to be announced).  While we’ve written a tremendous amount of code and are doing some things that no one hasn’t done - it’s just not right, he’s not comfortable yet.  Despite a growing sense of pressure from the forces that be, we’ve got one chance to launch and we’re going to wait to make sure we do it right.

Interestingly in this same video, Reid Hoffman makes the remark - “if you’re not embarrassed when your product goes live, you’ve waited too long”.   I totally agree - we’re not seeking perfection.  What we are seeking, however, is the right mix of features that makes our offering compelling.  Stowe’s touched on this recently as well:

Perhaps the number one argument I have with my start-up clients is about “how much is enough to get out the door in release 1.0?” I have had several clients in recent months who have released products that I believed lacked the minimum feature set needed to a/ capture attention of the digerati, but even worse b/ failed to have enough in them to allow viral uptake: the social dimension was lacking.

Source: /Message, “Learning From The Kiko Crash: Too Little, Too Late”

Balance is a bitch.

In what can only be filed under the “music-to-my-ears” category, Jupiter has a new study out discussing the increasing penetration of blogging into the corporate messaging mix:

JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, reveals that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.

According to a new report, “Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement,” currently 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs.

JupiterResearch Finds That Deployment of Corporate Weblogs Will Double in 2006 - JupiterResearch

I guess I have a few really big questions (something I sure that can be answered by someone with access to the actual report):

• What constitutes a large company?
• Isn’t this year almost over?
• What exactly costs $500K?  My guess is the content ;)

Of course, another very important question remains: What’s the story look like on the small business front?

technorati tags:blogging, corporate, adoption, research

I was just getting used to being home, but the train just keeps on moving these days.  I finally made it back to New York about a week ago, but I knew I was going to be gone before I knew it.

On Friday, I’ll be in San Francisco once again for a few days, 5 to be precise.  If we were supposed to meet, talk or follow-up, let’s try to coordinate during that period.  I won’t be back for at least 3 weeks :)

Wednesday, I’m off to Portland for WebVisions.  I had the honor of speaking on a panel last year with Matt May and Eric Rice.  This year, I’ll be cheering from the audience as many of my old favorites strut their stuff.  I’m in Portland from Wednesday until Friday night, I am suspecting.

Finally, I’ll be home Saturday morning (bloody red-eye) so I can catch my flight to Chicago on Sunday morning. I’ll be working the Exhibition Floor at ad:tech.  If you’re reading this and attending, please let me know.

Many large pieces are moving in concert now and we’re getting very close to sharing with the world what the big picture looks like.  Stay tuned.

There’s been considerable chatter regarding this term user-generated content. I hate the term for most of what it’s applied to, though there are some instances when it makes sense.

Jon Udell’s recent rant has gotten me thinking about this more

Everything about this buzzphrase annoys me. First, calling people “users” is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes, and should be stricken from the IT vocabulary (see Those clueless users) as well as from the publishing vocabulary. IT has customers and clients, not users. IT-oriented publishers have readers, not users.

Second, “content” is a word that reminds me more of sausage than of storytelling (see Sausage, traffic, and clueless users). As writers and editors we don’t “generate” “content,” we tell stories that inform, educate, and entertain — or should.

Jon Udell: User-generated content vs. reader-created context

My active activity online can better be grouped into three categories.

1. Active Publishing - When working like this I am creating original works that I share with the world at large by way of this fascinating new network we have access to. It is my pulpit - free to be shared with anyone that shares my vision - and I apply the care and review protocols that I deem appropriate.
2. Active Reading - When working like this I am an engaged reader that brings my thoughts, energies, and research into a conversation. Stowe is an active proponent of this term.
3. Active Particating - When working in this mode, I am contributing to online resources in a variety of new and interesting ways. For example, I might be filling out a poll on Om’s blog (I love that widget), tinkering with some new widget or application, or rating other resources.This is what I believe the better use of the term “user-generated content” really is. Indeed it is content that the user is creating. It’s a thin line that separates Active Reading and Active Participating and what one individual refers to as AR might just be AP for another.

At SocialRoots, we are building the company around the notion that whenever we’re being Active, we need to be factored into the equation from all angles - readership, audience, influence and revenue.

Scoble nails this:

You see, lots of people out there think that you’re gonna do all the hard work and donate it to companies so they can put advertising next to it. Only you don’t get to keep the money from that advertising, no no no. You don’t understand your place in this world, do you?

No, they are gonna take all your content AND take all the money that the advertising generates.

Even when you build your own thing on your own domain and spend time building your own audience they’ll only give you 20%. Don’t believe me? Come to any bloggercon and compare notes and see just what percentage of the revenues folks are being offered. I’ve done that and it isn’t pretty.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » The screwing of the Long Tail