Two-phase user adoption: from “oh, wow!” to “oh, yeah…”
August 27th, 2010
Note: I’m framing this post in terms of ExtensionFM because of a tweet, and because I believe that ExFM is a particularly interesting case, but this issue absolutely applies more broadly.
A few days ago Lucas Gonze Twittered:
I got drawn back into my Extension.fm setup today after forgetting it for a while. Important for apps to have that longevity.
Anyone who builds stuff online will tell you that this absent-mindedness on the part of users is almost inevitable.
No matter how good the thing you’ve made is, no matter how big the initial “oh, wow!” is for a user, there’s a crapload of other interesting stuff being released (as well as offline life continuing to roll along), and your cool thing will eventually be pushed to a back burner for a while. The question is what happens when your user hits that “oh, yeah…” moment of rediscovery.
I’ve already written about my belief that the wow moment comes from acknowledging that we’re all selfish bastards, and therefore offering users an immediate, obvious return on their investment of time, effort, and/or money. [A post that you're all going to go read, yeah?]
But there’s one thing I didn’t touch on in the post linked above: the fact that a user is inactive for a while doesn’t mean that you have to be inactive, too. In many cases you can offer that user some benefit from what happened during their inactive period.
The most obvious (and most rare) case is new functionality: the features that you release during those days or weeks may include the one that the user really, really wanted to see. Unlikely, yes, but it can happen. At the very least it gives people a feeling that your product is continuing to move forward.
The more likely scenario is that your services other users, or the Internet at large, are doing things that will be of interest to that lapsed user when they return. Carefully selected information from sources surrounding the user can highlight what they would have been getting, and help smooth the transition back into activity — you’re making it easier for the user to “catch up.”
And there is where ExtensionFM has a lovely little advantage: because it’s an extension of the browser (right now, anyway), ExFM can continue to do its very personalized thing whether or not the user remembers it’s there. I could forget to open the library tab for a month, but when I do get around to it I’ve got a month’s worth of music from the sources that I love organized and easily available: the service hasn’t become less valuable with my inactivity, rather it’s been busy while it waits for me.
Sure, ExtensionFM could do more to highlight this advantage, and to make it simpler for me to slice, dice, or “replay” what happened while I was checked out, but the foundation is there and extremely useful already.
While I still maintain that there’s more to be gained from focusing on the “successful” users than the “unsuccessful” ones, giving some thought to what that unavoidable group of “oh, yeah, that was pretty cool, I should check it out again” users will find when they finally return is well worthwhile.
Letter.ly’s Money Issues
July 13th, 2010
A few additional thoughts around the “paid” part of paid newsletters; in short, I’m wondering whether introducing money into the system is actually worth it for personal email newsletter creators.
1. Money as Motivation for Writers
A couple of letter.ly writers have mentioned the motivation to write that comes from having paid subscribers as a factor in their decision to try running a paid email newsletter, but I don’t entirely…um, buy this.
Having paid subscribers creates an obligation to write, rather than amotivation, and confusing those two can easily lead to intense feelings of stress and guilt without producing any additional writing.
Getting paid (even a token amount) can also provide justification for writing more, but that again is very different from providing the motivation to write more.
2. Money as Incentive for Comparison Shopping
Adding money to the system invites comparison to other sources of paid content, and for me, the obvious ruler was Daring Fireball. I pay $19/yr for Daring Fireball “membership,” which basically gets me all the writing that John Gruber puts up for free anyway, plus a bonus feeling of smug superiority.
I took a quick look at the DF archive, and Gruber posts at least one (and usually two or more) substantial pieces of writing each week, plus a number of small links/quotes with a sentence of commentary each day. And while you may or may not like Gruber’s style and positions, he’s an extremely good writer offering solid analysis and insights.
The quantity and quality of Daring Fireball at $19 makes me look hard at the $24 – $48 range that letter.ly writers are settling into; everything I’ve subscribed to has been good, but are the $3.99 newsletters actually $1 better than the $2.99 newsletters? Are they all “worth” more than Daring Fireball? Because I’m paying for them those comparisons inevitably come up, for better or worse.
3. Money as Proxy for Audience Commitment/Engagement
Sam Lessin (letter.ly creator) noted that one of his reasons for switching to a paid newsletter was that he wants an engaged audience, and that with letter.ly readers signal their commitment by paying for the subscription.
Despite the number of words I threw into the “comparative pricing” section of this post, I think that money — particularly a small amount of money — is a terrible proxy for commitment in this case.
Having to pay for a subscription puts a barrier up front, keeping out the most casual and disengaged of potential readers, but once a reader has subscribed we’re talking about a very small recurring charge on their monthly credit card bill: the newsletters that I subscribe to combined cost less than a single drink at some NYC bars.
Unless a writer sends out something that irritates a reader into using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, I suspect that a combination of inertia and social pressure [“X will know that I unsubscribed, will they take it the wrong way?”] will be enough to get people to ignore that latte-sized charge when reviewing their credit card bill each month — whether or not they’re actually paying attention to the newsletter.
4. Whit’s Alternative Formulations
I understand and agree with many of the motivations behind letter.ly, but I do question whether paid subscriptions are the most effective means for achieving letter.ly’s goals.
If the issue is curating your audience, then take some responsibility as ringmaster. Why not forget using money as a no-effort proxy and follow the route that the Pho list does? Have people send you an email explaining who they are and why they want to be on the list.
Select from among the people who are willing to make an investment of time and effort to be a part of your list, rather than just accepting anyone willing to spend a couple of bucks a month.
If the issue is ensuring an engaged, active audience, then require real activity from your newsletter subscribers. What if, rather than an unsubscribe link in each email, you had a “keep me subscribed” link? If a subscriber doesn’t click that link (or hasn’t clicked it for n consecutive newsletters), they’re automatically removed from the list.
Or take the same basic approach, but requiring a reply email at least once every n newsletters: if you’re not writing newsletters that people really want and pay attention to, your subscription count shows it.
Put a system in place so that an inactive user an unsubscribed user.
Obvious But Important
February 9th, 2010
Being a post on why I probably wouldn’t actually do what I asked Foursquare to do yesterday.
Yesterday I vented via feature request, noting that Foursquare has the potential to offer me more information about why I might want to be “friends” with people that I don’t know in person. But in talking with a few other people yesterday I realized that—while it felt good to write that little rant—were I Foursquare I would probably ignore my request.
Here’s the deal. When you’re trying to figure out what features to add for your users, there’s often a trap waiting for you: data.
Because you’re already generating a lot of stats about your users for your own use [You are, right? If not you've got an entirely different problem...], it’s incredibly easy to say something like “hey, we’ll add value for our users by giving them a chart that shows what days and times they post most frequently,” or “we’ll give users access to those statistics on the flux capacitor usage of the people they’re tracking!”
So what’s the problem? I mean, those are important metrics, right?
Well, sort of. For you, they’re information. Unless your users can actually do something with what you’re offering, though, you’re just dumping data on them. Charts are pretty, of course, and a screen full of numbers can make it look like your product or service is advanced and space-age, but if users can’t look at what you’ve added and say “oh, wow, I should really…” then you’ve probably wasted some effort.
The classic example for me is Linkedin. On the rare occasions that I log in to the service, I’m invariably told that “someone in the Internet industry has viewed your profile.” Really, Linkedin? I know you’ve got real estate to fill up in that right hand column, but that’s really the best use you could come up with?
But there’s another thing to consider, as well. While what I want Foursquare to do [show me the people and places, if any, that link me to this person making this friend request] does involve transforming data into useful information [would I as a Foursquare user benefit from becoming friends with this unknown person?], there’s an underlying issue here.
You see, if my feature were implemented, Foursquare would be tracking to see whether the change resulted in people adding a greater number of friends; because you’re giving people additional reasons to accept any given friend request (I don’t know X, but they regularly visit five of the places that I regularly visit), users should start accepting a greater percentage of their friend requests. If that starts happening, the change worked! Great, right?
Well, sort of. The issue underlying my feature request is a big one: is it actually good for Foursquare to nudge people towards accepting more friend requests? Are Foursquare users, on balance, happier users when they have a greater number of connections within the system, or should we be looking somewhere else to improve the experience?
It’s not just a question of whether users can do something with the information you offer them, it’s whether that information has the potential to help them make their experience better.
Conversationlists: Some Object, Strongly.
November 24th, 2009
For the most part, the response to conversationlist.com has been really gratifying. A lot of people found it interesting, some found it really useful, and for the most part the criticism we’ve gotten has been well thought out and constructive.
Sure, plenty of people found it uninteresting, stupid, or felt that something like favstar.fm’s dynamic “most favorited” list creator was a more useful tool (and the favstar.fm lists are definitely awesome, by the way), but that comes with the territory.
The one case where criticism struck me as a little odd was also — perhaps unfortunately — the case where it was coming from the highest profile source. Over the weekend Robert Scoble Twittered “Yo @nk can you block http://conversationlist.com/ from posting to “listed?” That service is VERY spammy and hides real value of lists.”
I know, ouch, right?
I made a little effort to reach out to Scoble for some more detail on his complaints about conversationlists, but haven’t (yet, at least) heard anything back, so I’ll address the possible complaints that I’ve dreamed up here and keep an eye on the comments to discuss anything else that comes up.
Problem One: being added to a bunch of lists called “conversationlist” doesn’t tell me anything about how people view me. It is, therefore, spammy.
I agree that being added to someone’s conversationlist is something different from being added to someone’s “influencers” list, or their “tech” list, but I don’t believe that it’s less valuable information. When you’re added to a conversationlist it’s because that person is actually paying attention to you on Twitter, either trying to engage with you or talking about you. It’s a dynamic state, rather than a static classification.
Granted, you can’t easily build a scorecard from this kind of list. Instead of “500 people have added me to lists named ‘tech’, and I am therefore one of the top tech resources on Twitter,” you have to say something like “I consistently appear on 50 people’s conversationlists, so I am having a measurable impact on the discussions happening on Twitter.”
Better still, you could say something like “why am I significant to this particular group of people? Do they agree or disagree with what I’m saying? Who and what else are they talking about?”
Conversationlists don’t tell you how people think about you directly, they tell you that people are actually interested in you on an ongoing basis.
Problem Two: they’re not [ahem] curated lists, it’s a machine making them. I want to know what people actually think.
Conversationlists are certainly not curated lists in the current buzzword sense, but nor are they created by machines; they are created by people just doing what they already do on Twitter. The machine is only there to keep track of what the people are doing.
Consider this: yes, my “tech” list (if I had one) would a be curated public statement. I would include the people I think are influential (even if I don’t really pay attention to them). I would probably make a point of excluding certain people that I think are overrated (even if I secretly pay attention to those people). I would try to include lesser-known “insider” people, so that other geeks would look at my tech list and say “hey, @whitneymcn didn’t just create that same tech list everybody else did, he knows about @ObscureCoolTechPerson, too.”
My tech list would (of course) be full of fascinating people, but it would also be a view into what I want you to think about me. That’s certainly useful, but it’s not “right” in and of itself. By offering insight on who I’m actually talking to and about, conversationlists give a different view, and one that I think is equally useful. I’m curating that list with my actions, every single day.
Hell, @scobleizer is on my conversationlist right now. I obviously don’t agree with what he’s saying, but I’m sure paying attention to him, and I think there’s value in exposing that fact.
Problem Three: I @reply lots and lots of people, and my friend doesn’t @reply anyone. Conversationlists are useless to us.
I don’t see much of a problem here: don’t use conversationlists if it doesn’t fit what you’re doing on Twitter. [Though do check out the additional tools that we're rolling out, okay?]
Some of the earliest feedback we got on conversationlists, from someone whose opinion I respect, included these two bullet points:
- I don’t do much public conversation in Twitter so my conversationlist is kind of weird.
- Killer idea.
So if I may paraphrase, this person said both “this thing is pretty much useless for me personally” and “I think that this thing is interesting” in the course of about four sentences. Is that crazy? No, I don’t think so. Conversationlists aren’t going to be useful for everyone. For what it’s worth, nor are Twitter lists going to be useful to everyone. The issue, however, is that “not useful to me” is rather different from “not useful.”
Conclusion
There may be other things that bug people about conversationlists, and Kevin and I really would love to hear them. Leave a comment, send an email, let us know. We won’t make every change that everyone would like to see, but we’ll absolutely listen to everything that people have to say.
Get Out of the Way
November 23rd, 2009
About a week ago I learned of last night’s checkins, a newly public service built using the Foursquare API.
Once you allow the service to access your Foursquare account, it starts sending you a daily email listing your checkins for the past 24 hours or so. Reply to that email with some notes about each checkin after its entry in the email and the service records them for you: it allows you to build a little annotated history of where you’ve been and what you did there.
lastnightscheckins.com structured email
Several weeks earlier, Songkick released their Twitter integration tool. Once you link your Twitter account to your Songkick account, Songkick monitors your tweetstream on the days that you’re going to shows, automatically captures any tweets that reference the band you’re seeing or have a specific hashtag, and then displays those tweets on the Songkick page for the gig.
Songkick.com Twitter integration
What’s excellent about both of these tools is that they do a very nice job of just getting out of the way.
Songkick also offers tools that allow you to submit reviews and other content directly to their service (and they’re pretty sweet tools), but I’m already used to Twittering little thoughts and mini-reviews of the shows I go to; the Twitter integration means that I can change over to using the Songkick-native tools if I want to, but if I don’t want to then Songkick gets out of the way and just makes the most of what I’m already doing.
Last Night’s Checkins could have guided people towards visiting their site to annotate the Foursquare checkins, and it would have been a defensible decision: the world is filled with services that have getting you on to their Web site as their primary goal. What’s great is that they did something way better than “defensible.”
At this point pretty much everybody sits down in front of their email inbox on a regular basis — I know that there are still people who don’t check daily, but I suspect that few of those people are active Foursquare users. I designing Last Night’s Checkins, the creator(s) clearly sat down and asked themselves “how can we make it as easy as possible for people to use this service?”
Instead of sending an email with a link to the site [read email, click link, log in to site, enter notes, save notes, try to remember what you were doing before this whole process started], they created an interface to the service that fits into the “email processing” that you’re probably already doing in the morning.
Compare the steps in the “link in an email” model…
- Read the email.
- Click the link.
- Log in to the site.
- Enter notes on the Web page, save Web page.
- Flip back to your email client.
- Try to get back into the task flow that was just disturbed.
…to the steps in the interface they actually created:
- Read the email.
- Click “reply.”
- Add inline comments to the “bullet points” in the email.
- Click “send.”
- Move on the the next email you have to process.
The issue isn’t that the link approach is that much more complicated, or has so many more steps — it’s that the link based approach would force you to change what you’re already doing in order to use the service.
While I like having the option of using service-specific tools that make the most of what the service can do, I hate being forced to use those tools. Over time I may decide to shift over to spending time on the Last Night’s Checkins site or using the native Songkick mobile tools, but that’s because both these services went out of their way to fit in with what I’m already doing.
Both these services let me test the waters without making a big behavioral commitment. I have the opportunity to start figuring out how they’re valuable to me even before I commit to diving in.
Twitter Lists: Categories and Conversations
November 6th, 2009
Anyone who’s spent any time with me in the past week or two already knows that I’m not a huge fan of Twitter lists, but I’ve come to realize that I’ve (once again) left many people with the impression that I’m more anti- on the topic that I actually am. In this post I’ll cover what I like about lists, what I don’t like, and also toss a little bonus experiment at the end.
As a starting point, I think that Twitter lists are a pretty decent feature that’s getting way too much attention because Twitter just got a big fat check (and because Twitter hasn’t actually added an obviously user facing feature in a good long while).
I also think that it’s very Twitter-like in that it’s unclear what lists are really for, and that the most interesting parts of the feature will likely come from what’s built on top by Twitter’s users.
That said, we move on to the good…
For me as an individual Twitter user, lists look like the feature that I’ve wanted for a year or more. Once client app support is well baked in, lists will be a relatively simple way to group and filter my tweetstream in place.
I’m not a promiscuous follower, but with even a couple of hundred people twittering away at me it’s easy to miss stuff from the core group of people that I really want to follow closely. With lists I can create a view for the 20 people that I want to keep close tabs on and just flip to that filtered view when I want to. [Yes, I know, Tweetdeck sort of does this, but I really don't like the narrow multiple column experience.]
For some organizations (The New York Times jumped right on board, for example) lists are a nice Twitter-native way to organize and showcase the contributions that their members are making on Twitter. The lists feature pulls data that had lived on the Web (which NYT staffers are on Twitter?) and moves it into Twitter itself. Handy.
And finally for Twitter itself, there are a couple of clear benefits.
For one, the suggested user list and the hullabaloo that surrounded it can finally be put to rest. Twitter can feature a random user-created list every day of the year, and if people are pissed about being included or left out, they can take it up with the listmaker, with Twitter’s compliments.
For another, Twitter now has many, many people basically tagging one another, in Twitter’s database, with useful little snippets of information. If Twitter wanted to, say, be able to segment out its users based on their interests for some mysterious reason, those lists can serve as neat little topical tags.
And the bad, which isn’t really so bad…
Now by “bad,” I mostly mean “weak,” which is my one word answer to the question “but what about Twitter lists as a way to discover people who tweet about topics that interest you?” My longer answer is that I don’t believe it’ll work for discovery long term, for a variety of reasons.
First issue: for the most part, people are making big lists.
I don’t know whether it’s because they’re concerned about offending people by omission, taking a completist approach to covering all aspects of a topic, or something else entirely, but add just a couple of these lists and you’re suddenly following 150 more people and enjoying Twitter overload. This list making behavior could change, but it looks like a real issue for adoption at the moment. [Update: I was wrong about list subscriptions appearing in the main stream, so this point can be chalked off as poor observation on my part.]
Second issue: list rot.
We’re all excited about making lists now, but how much time are we planning on dedicating to maintaining those lists? Part of Twitter’s appeal is that it’s a low effort, low friction tool, and I’ve got to wonder whether the current batch of lists will reflect the interesting new people who join Twitter (or those who stop using the service) three months from now. Again, this isn’t an inherent problem with lists, but it’s a real concern with regards to usage.
Third issue: once you’re following a list, there’s no way to tell which tweets in your timeline are associated with a given list—who is this person, and why are you seeing their tweets, again?
You start following a music list and suddenly you’re seeing this @schlarb dude twittering about his breakfast. To find out why you’re following him you’ve got to click through to his profile, check which lists he belongs to, and then try to recall which of those lists you subscribe to. Yet again, this isn’t an insurmountable problem, but it’s a UX flaw that has a meaningful effect on the experience of Twitter lists right now. [Also: note that Chris Schlarb is an incredible musician and an interesting guy, so you probably should follow him anyway.]
This third issue also points to the central concern that I have about lists as a discovery tool: the way that Twitter lists are most commonly used right now encourages us to sort people into single topic buckets on Twitter, when people’s tweets are as eclectic as the people themselves.
Take everybody’s favorite example, the venture capitalists. I follow a fair number of VCs on Twitter, and with a couple of exceptions I’d say that their tweets are about the business of venture capital and the areas/companies they invest in maybe half the time.
What’s the other half? Well, they twitter about their spouses and kids, the restaurant they’re at, music, the funny thing that they just saw…just stuff. It’s almost like they’re just regular human beings who have diverse interests and enjoy sharing those interests.
The realization that follows is that when one starts following a topical list, one can expect to get something like 50% on-topic signal and 50% off-topic noise. Sub-optimal experience, right there.
So what else can we do with lists, then?
Here’s one thought: what if rather than using Twitter lists to group people by category, we use them to group people by conversation?
If the goal is to find people who have interesting things to say about music, or food, or venture capital, why not start from a person who’s Twittering interesting stuff on that topic and link them to the people they’re talking to and talking about on Twitter? Seems like a decent way to find other people with good stuff to say on that topic, no?
Enter conversationalists. The idea occurred to me on Friday afternoon: the Twitter API allows you to create and modify lists, so why not have a dynamic, automatically updated “conversational list” of the twenty twitter users that you’ve @mentioned most recently? It makes explicit the community that you’re paying attention to, and offers people an easy way to add context for the list creator’s tweets by seeing what the creator is reacting to…it makes the experience a little deeper and richer.
And now, thanks to the awesome skills of Kevin Marshall, conversationalists have gone from a vague idea in my head on last Friday afternoon to working code on this Friday morning. And note that this timeline includes the four days that he apparently spent dead drunk in New Orleans, so it’s a pretty damn impressive accomplishment on his part.
Conclusion
Go, read a little more about it, create your own conversationalist, follow the conversationalists created by others. I’m curious to see how this idea plays out.
I don’t think that this approach is necessarily “better” than topical groupings, but it seems like an approach that factors in the very human feel of Twitter, and it’s therefore worth a few bits and a few hours to explore.
A number of people asked me about what I meant by being invested in “being wrong in interesting ways” after my blog post a couple of weeks ago, and this is a prime example. I may not be right about this being a worthwhile use of Twitter lists, but I’m certain that if I am wrong then we’ll all find some interesting stuff in the process: I’ll have been wrong in an interesting way.
Microsoft marketing: welcome to the social, sort of.
October 29th, 2009
Update, only a very few hours later: wait until you’ve read the rest of the post before you click through here, but it just gets worse and worse.
As Microsoft marketing oopsies go this barely even registers, but it hits a number of interesting points on its path to cringiness so it’s worth a little attention. Yesterday I happened across the “What People Are Saying About Windows 7″ page, located at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/social/, which looks something like this:
Go ahead, visit the page. Then reload the page. Then reload it again. Notice anything? Yes, that ostensibly real time flow of what people are saying starts with the same tweet each time, and as of the time of this writing that tweet was five seven hours old. If you want to head over to the Twitter search page and confirm that people have said things about Windows 7 since then, feel free…we both know what you’re going to find, don’t we?
Now I know, some of you may be inclined to say “oh, come on, it’s marketing for fuck’s sake, don’t you have anything better to complain about?” But here’s the thing: it’s half-assed, lazy, me-too marketing, and that’s totally worth complaining about, especially in a case like Microsoft’s, where this sort of marketing appears to be an institutionalized habit.
Starting with the smallest point first, the presentation is pointlessly godawful. While the UX conventions for presenting tweets aren’t set in stone, pretty much everybody else in the world presents a vertical scrolling list, newest at the top, with tweets shown in their entirety. It’s relatively simple, and it makes sense.
Showing partial tweets marching across and then down the screen at a pretty zippy default speed makes them extremely difficult to read. It also makes me absolutely certain that during one of the many, many meetings dedicated to designing this page someone stated that having actual real time Tweets “really wasn’t necessary,” because the point of the page is to “dynamically illustrate how much buzz there is around Windows 7.”
Next, in order for this to work, there’s some poor soul at Microsoft sitting there with the task of periodically going through and either approving or [shudder] manually entering information about the tweets that are approved for display on the site. Awesome, right? We’re all about finding jobs for people these days.
But why? Why is all this happening? As with the search engines, Microsoft is under no obligation to display all the tweets that reference “Windows 7″ or “Win 7,” so filtering is no big deal. A five minute buffer with a filter on blatant obscenity would probably clear out about 90% of the anti-Windows 7 tweets and be entirely defensible. If you then added tools for the aforementioned poor soul at Microsoft to ban specific Twitter users, words and phrases, and URLs, then the spam and snarky anti-MS screenshot potential of the site drops to nearly zero…while making it a lot closer to “what people are saying about Windows 7″ and easier to manage to boot.
It’s mind boggling. Microsoft has decided to go with a “we’re the operating system of the real people” [i.e. not those effete Apple snobs] and “you can have it your way” [i.e. you can buy cheap crap hardware in any configuration you like if you want to] spin on their recent marketing, but there are few companies that put bigger asterisks and more legal disclaimers next to the words “social” and “open.”
At least Apple is up front about it. Apple knows exactly how you should view and use their products, and if you have differing ideas on that it’s very nice and you can file them right here in this circular file, thank you very much, and just leave your check there on the table on your way out.
To the company’s credit, I guess, Microsoft recognizes that there’s good opposing territory just waiting to be claimed on the marketing front, but they’re so astonishingly terrified of what actual people might say, so convinced that every product release is a delicate flower that will wilt under the slightest adversity, that time after time they wade through so many filters, approvals, disclaimers, and “representative user profiles” that they end up with stick figure caricatures mouthing platitudes.
Always and Everywhere
October 28th, 2009
One: On Monday morning, Fred Wilson posted a little joke. Louis Gray had noted that a new addition to the Twitter staff appeared as a member of the “twitter team” list on Twitter before any announcement of the hire came out of the company, and Wilson added: “Hmm. No need to send out that obligatory email now. Just check the Twitter company lists to find out who is changing jobs.”
Two: I think that his comment was mostly some early morning humor, but like many good jokes it was poking at something serious. For a little more perspective, let’s add in a quote from Andy Weissman’s tight post (also Monday) on online distribution: “I don’t think information (content) wants to be free. I think it just wants to be distributed friction-free.”
Three: the final piece of perspective…a month or so ago I had a day where I was hit by a tidal wave of information: shortly after a couple of meetings, I was notified that people who had come up in the conversations (or people from the companies discussed) had started following me on Twitter and/or Tumblr. I saw via last.fm and Tumblr that a friend had started listening to an album I had passed along a week or so before. Another friend twittered enthusiastically from a restaurant I had recommended a couple of days earlier.
Now in most—probably all—of these cases I’m sure that the people involved realized that these breadcrumbs would come my way, but none of it was provided as explicit feedback. The nature of the ecosystem [infosystem, technosystem, whatever] that many of us are now exploring is such that an increasing number of our actions become input, with the outputs not yet clearly defined.
Go: consider that the benefits and pleasures of putting real information about ourselves online are becoming increasingly compelling, that many of the new sharing services work hard to be focused, simple, and easy to use, and that mobile devices are making “always and everywhere” access to these services closer to a reality.
Online privacy is becoming as much an issue of information flow as it is an issue of traditional information security, and (more significant, I suspect) the bright line between online and offline is starting to blur. We’re starting to see interesting benefits from integrating the online world into the real time living of our daily lives, but it’s very new territory.
We’ve seen this sort of integrated life appear as art and experiment, but the day-to-day reality of it is going to be something very different. It’s not about the omnipresent archival documentation that caught our imagination early on, but about making new kinds of interactions possible. And as with the simple act of adding someone to a Twitter list creating ripples, the implications of what we’re doing are not yet entirely clear. Make no mistake, this change is happening, so far better to try to understand it than to pretend we can stop it. Be apprehensive, yes, and be thoughtful, but be excited.
Thoughts on a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose
October 22nd, 2009
Earlier today Josh Stylman pointed out an interesting post by Mark Pilatowski entitled Search and Social: Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose? While the short answer to that question is “what do you mean will become a sewage-filled spam hose?” I’d like to dig a little deeper than that.
It’s well worth clicking through above and reading the entire post, but I’ll give you the first paragraph here:
As most of you probably know Bing and Google announced that they have finalized agreements with Twitter to begin incorporating Tweets into their search engine results. Everyone seems to be overjoyed and excited about this. Search engines are excited because they get access to the Twitter firehose and they can begin providing real time results in the SERPs. Twitter is happy because they are finally getting paid. Searchers are happy because they can now get real time results for queries that deserve it, like breaking news. Everyone seems to be overjoyed about the possibilities and I myself am very interested to see how this all plays out. I do have one concern and that is how are Bing and Google going to deal with the issue of spam when it comes to real time search via Twitter results?
Two issues jump out at me from that first paragraph: the phrase “real time results for the queries that deserve it, like breaking news,” and the question “how are Bing and Google going to deal with the issue of spam when it comes to real time searh via Twitter results?” The two are very much intertwined, to the point where I think they’re aspects of a single question: how can you use Twitter’s data to enhance a search of the web?
Taking on the real time results view of things first, I question whether displaying tweets at the top of a search is where the interesting stuff necessarily has to happen at first. Yes, that’s real time and kind of cool, but does it enhance my experience when searching the web? Not sure about that. More recent isn’t necessarily better. As Pilatowski points out, breaking news is the poster child here, but outside of the oft-cited earthquakes example, how often does Twitter bring you the substance of breaking news and how often does it bring notification of breaking news and a link?
A lot of links, not a lot of meaty, 140 character eyewitness reports, right?
So if you’re a search engine, just having access to that Twitter firehose—even if you never display a single tweet in your result set—does get you some hugely useful real time information to work with in a format you’re used to dealing with. Your real time data set from Twitter is pointing out significant links (many of which may not recently/yet have been crawled) and effectively associating them with a few keywords. So when that “earthquake” or “kanye west” search term is submitted, you know that topic just became hot on Twitter a few minutes ago, and you’ve got a frequency count on a bunch of URLs that can either supplement or help rank the URLs you would have returned pre-Twitter. Real time relevance, right there.
The spam question then rears its head. You’ve all likely taken a look at the tweets associated with Twitter’s trending topics, and know full well that spammers will latch on to anything that’s happening in an effort to sell more discount herbal web cam work-at-home cigarette franchises. So won’t the spammers just use Twitter to hit the “real time” part of search results?
I don’t think so.
See, if you’re Twitter the company, you have to walk rather softly around spammers. While spammers are certainly an irritation on Twitter the service, they’re a relatively mild one, and if an anti-spam measure taken by Twitter the company (say, something around following/follower ratio) should affect any legitimate users, uproar will inevitably follow. Twitter the company is also Twitter the service, and so if the company modifies what tweets a users sees—at all—they’re changing an element of the service itself. And then people will opine (perhaps accurately) that they’re “breaking” the service.
So Twitter the company seems to tread pretty lightly in a lot of areas, spam included. I suspect that there have been at least a few relatively simple projects tossed around internally that could make a huge impact on Twitter spam, before being shelved because of the impact (real or perceived) on non-spammy users of the service.
If you’re Bing or Google, on the other hand, Twitter is just a data stream. The search engine have absolutely no need to be “fair” to Twitter’s users, give those users the benefit of some sort of doubt, or think about how a given anti-spam measure might affect Twitter the service; the search engine’s decisions on how to slice and filter the data do not affect Twitter the service in any way.
The search engines can decide that only Twitter users with a following:follower ratio of X:Y or better will be included in their analysis and display pool, to exclude forever after any user who tweets a link to a domain that the search engine considers “bad,” or take any other approach they like to filtering the data. Who’s going to complain? On what grounds?
I think that Pilatowski nailed the key issues in his post, but my gut says that he has taken on too much of Twitter’s perspective on these issues, and not enough of the [...um, still largely hypothetical...] “real time search” perspective. Particularly if the Twitter firehose is being used primarily as a behind the scenes data source as described above, the search engines have far more latitude to attack problems in Twitter’s data that does Twitter itself.
Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Contemplation
October 21st, 2009
Tom Johnson’s Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass is a fascinating composition. It’s music and text that explore the idea of failure, and well worth the nine minutes you’ll invest in listening.
The piece popped into my head because of a conversation I had a couple of days ago. We were talking about the positive trend of people publically discussing failure. A few years ago it was surprisingly hard to find anyone going public with their thinking on the failure of a company, project, or feature, but it’s increasingly common to see some public thinking happening post-failure; it was noted, however, that these writeups tend to have a rather confessional character, and appear only after the lights have been turned out and the doors locked.
People tend to blog (or otherwise make public) the “hey, awesome stuff coming down the pike” stuff, and are increasingly willing to open up the “here’s how it all went off the rails” stuff after the fact, but there’s still a pretty big taboo against making public the little, inevitable, failures that happen along the way to either success or failure on the large scale. I can understand why that taboo exists, of course, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon.*
This idea stuck in my head because I’m currently in the process of failing to some degree, so it seems worthwhile to practice what I preach and get a little analysis out there.
It’s been an eventful four and a half months months for me, but the the component that’s most relevant here is that I’ve gone from a gleeful “I’m not working!” to a nonspecific “okay, I should really be working…on, ah, something…so now what?”
A part of this is pretty specific to me and my situation. Over the past few months it’s been very easy for me to fall into a line of thinking like this: my dad helped found an academic discipline, wrote and edited more than a dozen books, and made a real impact on the lives and careers of dozens, if not hundreds, of his students. On my side of the scale, I’ve figured out some ways to get people to click on emails more often. And made some Internet stuff that a few people kind of like. Hm. What was it I wanted to do, again? And why, exactly?
Where this applies to the general case is that it’s a mindset that exists in many forms, and it insidiously chips away at one’s ability to just do things. It turns out that the thing I built has already been done pretty well by someone else? Ah, I guess I won’t bother releasing it. That service’s API is set up in a way that means my idea would have to be a pretty iffy hack? Okay, I’ll put it on the metaphorical shelf for a while, not a big deal. With data plugged in, this service idea wouldn’t actually work the way I’d thought? Oh well, whatever, never mind.
The more entrepreneurial among you may well point out this is natural, and that the real issue is working through it. Execution matters more than ideas, it’s not always obvious up front which undertakings will be meaningful, nor is it clear where a given path will end up. Iterate. Pivot. So on.
But the formulation of this that’s helping me get through this is a little bit different. You see, I’ve never thought that I was particularly invested in being right. There is a geek archetype that knows the objectively right answer on everything—how to indent code, market a product, make coffee, whatever—and must also use that knowledge to correct those sad individuals who are in error. That approach to life bugs the shit out of me, so I’ve tried to focus on being right when I can and being wrong in interesting ways when I can’t.
The interesting realization for me is that I’ve been overlooking that model for a good while. I’ve been focused on trying to figure out the objectively right thing to do now, and that’s paralyzing. I now have to do something with this realization, of course, but it’s a start. I may not be right with what I do going forward, but I’m less worried about that than I was yesterday.
Thanks for listening. Go listen to the Tom Johnson piece now, if you haven’t.
* Though note that silence speaks volumes anyway, so a lot of individuals, startups, and smaller companies actually broadcast the fact, if not the details, of some sort of failure these days, when they suddenly go silent.
