Results tagged “twitter”
January 15, 2010
Suggested User List Ideas
A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to collect some useful data since I'd been logging my account's activity using Gina Trapani's ThinkTank application. So I offered an Amazon gift certificate as a little token prize to encourage everybody to chip in ideas of how to analyze that data.
As my follower count crept past 300,000 a number of you responded with suggestions of what information you were curious about, submitting your ideas by using the #sulidea hashtag.
Before I reveal who's won an Amazon certificate, here's a list of all of the suggestions that I found, sorted by Twitter user name.
Since there were lots of good ideas, I've decided to give out two awards, one for the most universal, and one for the most thought-provoking.
Nate Chenenko asked, "How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?" I think this is the fundamental question. Are people who follow someone on the suggested user list interested in posting to Twitter at all? Is it just a passive experience for them? Ricardo Guerrero formulated this in terms of time period of activity instead of tweet count, which is similar but slightly less indicative, when he asked, "I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed." And Jay Neff phrased it as, "What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time" So Ricardo and Jay get Honorable Mentions, along with a few others who asked similar questions, while Nate gets a prize.
And Sharon Henry gets a prize for articulating another common theme in an interesting way: "Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000 ". That seems eminently doable, so I really found it appealing. In short, what I'm hoping for is two core bits of data from which we can extrapolate a lot of meaning:
- How many followers do each of my followers have?
- How many tweets do each of my followers have, and when was the last time they were active?
Those are pretty straightforward requests to make with the Twitter API. So, there's still a chance to win another prize. If you're a coder, commit either of those queries as a feature built onto ThinkTank and I'll send you a 500 GB portable hard drive.
Thanks to everybody who participated! I'll try to make the data from these requests available as soon as possible, and the few questions above that I have answers to will be replied to shortly.
January 5, 2010
Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers
Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.
First, to recap: I had about 18,000 followers of my own back in October, when I got added to the suggested user list. (Let's call these "organic" followers.) If I'd have continued my normal rate of growth, i'd have about 25,000 followers today, but thanks to being on the list, I've got close to 300,000 followers. Surprisingly though, I only get as many retweets and replies as I'd get with my organic number of followers.
I thought at first that maybe the list wasn't valuable to me because I'm not a celebrity; maybe I'm just noise, but could bigger brands find some value by having a large number of followers?
The Results Are In
As I hoped, my initial post about my experiences inspired others on the list to chime in with their findings.
- Creative Commons, despite being a stalwart organization at the intersection of technology and intellectual property, saw no increase in responses after being added to the suggested user list.
- NBC's Today Show is one of the signature brands of broadcast media. But being on Twitter's list? Didn't do anything.
- What about Starbucks, one of the definitive examples of a powerful worldwide brand? Nothing.
I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.
Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.
A few people have asked what my goal is in writing about the experience of being on the list, and why I am offering up prizes to encourage asking questions about it. Well, perhaps the best way to articulate it is that I think the list is being used as a useful fiction for distorting the value and promise of this new medium.
The Million Dollar Gift
There are incentives to promoting the fiction of the suggested user list, of course. If I were the brand manager or Chief Marketing Officer for some big company that got on the list, I bet I'd be proudly trumpeting to senior management that "our social media efforts are bringing us thousands of new followers a day on Twitter". Somebody's gonna get a huge bonus for being the beneficiary of an act of random benevolence. Hell, I'm a pretty persuasive guy — if I found the right (i.e. sufficiently desperate) media outlet, I could probably have sold my Twitter account to somebody for half a million dollars. Well, at least I could have until last week.
And the list preserves a certain amount of power and influence for Twitter itself. (Twitter the company, not twitter the medium.) Because, for every one of the organizations i quoted above mentioning how the suggested user list provided them no value, I got a private message from another list member confirming these findings but not wanting to be quoted on the record.
People being afraid to publicly state their opinion about something of little value for fear of antagonizing a particular company is a clear sign of a completely unhealthy dynamic. I don't think the folks at Twitter would retaliate for public criticism by removing people from the list, because Twitter execs are both extremely busy and fairly thick-skinned, but it shows how insecure people feel about having won the follower lottery. (And how pageview-obsessed publishers are: Every entity that was afraid of being removed from the suggested user list is in the business of publishing content online.)
Fact Check
CNN famously reported on Ashton Kutcher beating them to be the first to get a million followers on Twitter; Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism, to provide a basis for fact-checking that demonstrates these pronouncements are inherently suspect. It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.
The truth: Nobody has been able to point me to a single Twitter account that's earned over 250,000 followers on its own. Nobody's been able to point me to a Twitter account on the suggested user list that's gotten favorites, replies, retweets or responses from a larger number. And nobody's been able to demonstrate why the inflated follower count numbers should be used as a measure of anything but the growth in signups to the core Twitter service itself. [Update: I had suspected some popular artist like Nicki Minaj, the Lil Wayne protege who has famously rapped about her Twitter following, might exceed these numbers. As it turns out, the highest organic follower count I've found is from teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber with over 800,000.]
That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn't add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you're a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.
Reminder: I'm running a contest for ideas about how to get more data from my being on the suggested user list. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank since before I was added to the suggested user list. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months.I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea of what information we should query from that data set, as well as one random programmer who contributes code to help.
Here's the prizes and how to participate:
- Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
- If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive.
I'll be picking winners for both prizes on January 15th.
December 29, 2009
Life on the List
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I'll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I'll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I'll have averaged 100 new followers every hour. It's not that I'm great at writing tweets or because of any effort or merit on my part; It's because I'm part of Twitter's list of suggested users.
The Suggested User List has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood parts of the explosive growth of everybody's favorite cerulean social service, though the company has loudly hinted that its life is limited. So I thought I'd explain a little bit about what Twitter is like when you're on the list. I'll explain the surprising impact that being added to the list has on replies and retweets. And at the bottom of this post, I'm even offering up a chance for people who are curious about being on the list to win some prizes, too.
What is the list?
Twitter's Suggested User List works in a fairly simple way. When a new user signs up for Twitter, they're presented with a list of about 20 "default" accounts to follow. These recommendations are a random subset of a full list of over 400 suggested users. In addition, the full list appears on the Twitter site itself, so if any user clicks on "Find People" at the top of their Twitter page, they're only one click away from choosing to follow some suggested users.
It's obvious why the team created these suggestions; If you just signed up for Twitter and weren't following anyone, it'd be a pretty boring service. Social applications have provided plenty of precedent for the practice of suggesting content or connections, but Twitter's exceptional success and the fact that tweets are seen more as a new medium rather than merely a feature of the Twitter service have made the suggested user list into a polarizing reminder of the company's power over the service.
What's not obvious is why I was picked as a suggestion. I have a number of friends at Twitter, including about half a dozen let's-grab-dinner-when-you're-in-town level of friends. As Biz noted, I was an early an enthusiastic fan of the service. And I'd like to think I'm not a terrible tweeter — my updates are a mix of interesting links that I find, random thoughts, brief reviews/mentions of music and media that I like, and promotion for the projects I'm working on. But I'm obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, I never asked to be on the list, and it's never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it's clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they'd want to show new users.
A list of suggested contacts makes perfect sense when a service has about 10,000 users, to help them get started in an unfamiliar space. But it's a system that starts to strain a bit once a service reaches 10,000,000 members. (Or even, as it appears, nearly 100 millon members.) Of course, the folks at Twitter had no way of knowing they'd leap from a five-digit user count to a nine-digit one faster than anybody else on the web ever has. Combine Twitter's support for user-defined lists on the service and the criticisms of the list that have surfaced, and it's easy to see why Twitter's announced that the list's days are numbered. I'd be shocked if it doesn't disappear entirely in 2010.
So, I don't have any real issue with the fact the list was made in the first place; If I were a Twitter shareholder, I'd fully expect the team to design the best possible experience for new users. (If I were a substantial Twitter shareholder, I'd buy a round bed and fly it through space like Snoop Dogg. But I digress.)
I do have some misgivings about the effect of the list, though. In addition to showing how much control Twitter has over the medium they've created, the list also causes some pretty uncomfortable and awkward distortions. It conveys remarkable privileges to the few hundred of us who are members. A lot of celebrities, some past their prime, have pointed to their enormous numbers of followers on Twitter as evidence that they still command some sort of passionate following online. Other nascent talents have had their profiles raised by becoming "Twitter stars", with their thousands or even millions of followers held up as proof of strong demand for their ideas.
A Dutch kid sold his Breaking News account to MSNBC, and Kim Kardashian is famously selling her tweets for $10,000 a pop. But I've been able to determine that having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is basically only a measure of having been on the suggested user list, and doesn't consistently indicate any intent from Twitter users at all. So, not to take away from Breaking News or Kim Kardashian, but there are people making a significant amount of money simply by virtue of having been on the suggested user list.
And it turns out, those suggestion-heeding followers might not actually be paying any attention at all.
The Power of Suggestion
I had no advance notice I was going to be added to the list. I went out for coffee with a friend, and returned to find a few hundred emails in my inbox, all of them notifications from Twitter that someone had followed me.
To my surprise, and to the disbelief of nearly everyone who's asked me about it since, I wasn't immediately excited or thrilled to have won the Twitter jackpot. For the first weekend, I wasn't sure what to do with all these new followers, and I didn't update my status at all for 2 or 3 days after I first got added to the list.
Now, that's pretty unusual behavior for me — I've been blogging for ten years, and I'm fairly public within the tech industry. I don't get nervous standing in front of thousands of people when speaking, and over the years my blog's gotten a pretty significant number of subscribers as well, yet I never had any similar concerns here. So what changed? Well, I tend to use social services in a more personal way than my public blog post. And, honestly, the sheer rate at which people follow a suggested user on Twitter's list is overwhelming. Let's look at the velocity with which a suggested account accrues new followers.
Here's a chart of my new followers, courtesy of TwitterCounter;:
The small flat area at the extreme left of the graph is what my growth rate looked like before I was on the list. It doesn't seem like it, but that was actually an uncommonly high rate of new followers. For contrast, I did a comparison with Chris Messina, who accrues new followers at about the same rate I had been, writes about similarly geeky topics as I do, and actually started wtih more followers than I did:
Yes, compared to being on the suggested user list, a very popular normal Twitter user's growth looks pretty much flat. That's how different it is. Nevertheless, after a few days of being on the list, I decided I was going to just tweet the same way I always had, and not overthink things too much.
Finding Meaning
People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they've barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.
There's precedent for this sort of "bundled content", of course. The crappy "shovelware"; programs that come with most Windows PCs are a perfect example — they often nag users, are frequently of little value, and often detract from the experience. I often update with non-sequitirs about stuff like peanut butter jelly time, so I have to imagine that a regular Twitter user seeing my updates must see me like a notice that their new Windows computer has cleaned up the icons on their desktop.
Of course, services like Amazon and iTunes feature content as well, but these are usually pretty straightforwardly analogous to endcap displays in retail spaces like a grocery store or Walmart; The stores sell placement and brands that want exposure pay for the real estate.
After just a few days of being on the list, though, I made an interesting discovery that offers a dramatic distinction from buying featured position in an online store: Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.
Once in a while, I get confused replies from people asking who the hell I am, but for the most part they don't interact with me at all. The replies, retweets and conversations that happen for me on Twitter have the same frequency and volume that they would have had if I'd never been added to the list. I'm sure celebrities (whether on the suggested user list or not) get a disproportionately high number of people trying to catch their attention, but for a normal person, being on the list just adds followers, not real connections.
Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal" followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed at all.
And for me, that's a little off-putting. I feel very much like I've earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they've read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it's still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it's hard for me to tell whether someone's made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.
I'm not complaining; I know a lot of people would love (or think they'd love) to be on the list. I've had some remarkable bits of serendipity, like my next door neighbor discovering me on the list. But I also missed the notification that my cousin was following me on the service because there's too much noise for me to turn on notifications. For the way I use the web, I value meaningful connections much more than I do sheer volume of followers.
Adding to the feeling that these aren't "real" connections is that almost nobody has gotten more than 200,000 followers or so without being on the suggested user list. I'd be curious to know the most popular account that's never been on the list, but at the very least the combination of prominently featuring follower count as a "score" on people's profile pages while also having the only path to earning a high score being an arbitrary selection through an opaque process is a recipe for leaving a lot of people frustrated or mystified. Indiscriminate followers might be of some value for a business that just wants to have a lot of people to talk to, but for an individual, being on the list only has value to those who want to brag about the number. I'll admit I've been tempted to use my follower count as a credential in my work lately as it's taken me to less tech-savvy corners of Washington, D.C., but the fact that the number is meaningless made me feel it'd be dishonest and would misrepresent my actual influence.
Because I've been privileged enough to be on the list, I've tried to use the power for good. I am very happy that I'll be able to promote my work with Expert Labs to a larger audience, though I don't think I have any way to translate this audience into followers of @expertlabs. I have also tried to promote worthy efforts by my friends or to support charities. But there's also generally a continuous stream of requests from spammers and schemers and just plain icky hustlers who want, expect or even demand that I promote their work to my large follower base. Explaining to them that these followers don't click on links, reply or retweet requests does nothing to dissuade them, unsurprisingly.
So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.
Open to Suggestions
I want to see what interesting information we can tease out of my place on the suggested user list. There are a number of questions that immediately pop to mind, which I don't have specific answers for:
- Has the rate of replies or retweets per day (or per week) increased as much as my follower count has?
- Do I get more favorites from users, proportionate to the number of new followers?
I suspect there are lots of other bits of data that I think could be compelling, and the good news is that we might have a way to process some of that data. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank (formerly Twitalytic) since before I was added to the suggested user list. The app can pretty easily be customized to return whatever data queries we're interested in. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months. So I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.
Here's the prizes and how to participate:
- Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
- If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive. It's really cute!
I'll run the contest until January 15th, and then just pick a winner at random from people who tweet or submit code. I think there's great potential to discover some surprising insights about how the suggested user list really works.
December 18, 2009
The Twitter API is Finished. Now What?
Update: We've got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he's added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.com. I should also make clear that I am very confident that we'll be building apps on top of this API at Expert Labs, so insofar as I'm the Director of the labs, I've got a vested interest in seeing efforts around an open API succeed.
Twitter's API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter's API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.
From here, we're going to see a flourishing of support for the Twitter API across the web, meaning that the Twitter API is finished. Not kaput, complete. If two companies with a significant number of users that share no investors or board members both support a common API, we can say that the API has reached Version 1.0 and is safe to base your work on. So now what?
How We Got Here
Like a lot of folks, I've been thinking out loud and pondering the future of Twitter and open web APIs pretty much all year. Some key ideas have bubbled up:
[A]ny site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook.
- Upgrades to the web are incremental.
- Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem.
- There has to be value before everybody has upgraded.
- You have to be able to understand and explain it.
Those posts from this summer show that the ideas behind the Twitter API's "overnight" ubiquity have been kicking around in developer circles for months, if not more than a year. Finally, though, we have shipping examples of broad adoption of an API that's lightweight and suitable for today's most interesting applications. It's not just that Twitter's realtime, though of course that is compelling, but also that these APIs are simple enough for weekend hackers to build interesting projects on, and that they're easy to implement even on mobile devices and in almost any programming language.
So, today, we have support for the Twitter API from Twitter (of course), WordPress and Tumblr. I know I saw folks working on this for TypePad's free service when I was at Six Apart, so I'd assume they just wanted to finish OAuth support before supporting it as well. (See below.)
Of course, I don't need to make any suggestions to developers about what to do with these APIs — I'm sure the gears in everybody's heads are turning about cool new applications to build. Instead, I'd like to make a series of suggestions for the entire Open Twitter API ecosystem, based on what we've learned from past successes and failures in APIs around blogging.
What Server Developers Should Do
- Please please please support OAuth: It's egregious that the newest implementations of the Twitter API are stil encouraging people to share their passwords with third-party sites. Five or ten years ago, this was common practice in APIs because we didn't have better options. Twitter started out using shared passwords, but mercifully has started to bring OAuth support online. But for new services to be encouraging the horrible practice of users entering their passwords into every application willy-nilly is just unacceptable. I think we have a two-week window or so within which the new services supporting the Twitter API could announce their intention to support OAuth and really catalyze client developers into doing the wrong thing, but I fear we may lose another generation of API evolution to this terrible practice. If just one or two services announce intent around OAuth by the end of the year, client developers will follow — if you use WordPress or Tumblr, encourage your service provider to do this. (This is usually where I'd insert a dozen examples of how sharing passwords screws users, services, and the ecosystem, but I know that developers often just use shared passwords because they're lazy. Do the right thing, guys. The client devs will follow along.)
- Support Really Simple Discovery: The RSD format isn't sexy by today's standards, but grew organically out of some smart thinking from when blogging APIs were at the same state of maturity as today's tweeting APIs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, developers should look at supporting RSD and looking for something like a "tweetsapi" endpoint for these new services. That way, any arbitrary site can advertise that it supports the Twitter API, or even future versions of an open MetaTweets API. Pay attention to which APIs are listed as "preferred".
- Think about overloading of
source: Thesourceelement of status updates in the Twitter API is very interestingly open-ended, and supports use of URLs. Instead of merely advertising your client app, smart use ofrelattributes and URLs here could help bootstrap some very interesting new potential.
What Client Developers Should Do
- Support RSD: Same logic as above.
- Start sharing parsing libraries: Client devs going to be doing a lot of duplicate work to parse out URLs and usernames and hashtags and maybe even slashtags. But almost every scripting language supports some similar variation on regular expressions, and if you're using that method to tease out meaning from short messages, then lighten your burden by sharing the load. John Gruber's work to share his URL parsing rules should be a model for a dozen other GitHub projects — compete on features and execution, but not on these fundamental interpretations of text.
- Build in the big services, but support the little ones: You'll naturally want to offer menu options for users of the big, centralized hosted services. But (perhaps as part of supporting RSD), you should allow for all of us to have arbitrary Twitter API endpoints on our own domain names — this is good for the web!
What Every Developer Should Do
- Think about piping Twitter API endpoints together: I think it will be common for some kinds of applications that support the Twitter API to be both clients and servers, supporting piping content through, and perhaps applying transformations to the updates. This idea of daisy-chaining services together is likely only going to happen if a lot of parts of the infrastructure support OAuth well, but has the potential to be truly revolutionary if the ecosystem allows it to happen.
- Start looking at people's firehoses: Twitter's firehose of all status updates is about to be broadly available for developers, I know about the free TypePad firehose from my time at Six Apart, and I think WordPress will sell you access to theirs, but I haven't yet been able to find a reference for one for Tumblr. No matter — we should assume that free, open versions of these are coming, and start to figure out how to encourage similar collaboration around the reading side of things, now that the writing side of things is getting hashed out.
- Consider adopting a "+2 Rule": The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that shit, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. Keep making new apps and see what you can do to stretch the limits of the existing methods and structures. I love the new geocoding and contributor aspects of the Twitter API, but as I said at the top of this post, I think the period of rapid iteration on the core Twitter API is ending, as new efforts going forward will have to reach consensus.
The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."
This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That shit does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.
So, get to work! Please give me feedback if I'm wrong or being stupid about one of my recommendations, but if not, then just start hacking. Stop encouraging people to share passwords, start encouraging services to share tweets, and let's all join in a hearty session of finger-pointing and mockery in Facebook's general direction for their sense of Not Invented Here having overshadowed their opportunity, because they could have really clearly done an "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" on the Twitter API if they hadn't wanted to make their own system a year ago, and now they've lost that power.
Finally, thanks a lot to Dave Winer for essentially inspiring a lot of players in blogging to move towards embracing the Twitter API. Sure, lots of us had the idea, and I've spent a lot of times in meetings arguing for this stuff across the industry, and Automattic and Tumblr and others were brave enough to embrace it. But I don't think anybody's done more to publicly advocate for an open Twitter API than Dave. I'm glad we've evolved as a community to the point where these kinds of breakthroughs aren't the contentious, immature shitfests they used to be.
October 30, 2009
Twitter, Outlines, Lists, Directories, Y!ou
Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.
- Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.
- Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.
- Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.
- One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.
- Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.
That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.
The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.
Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.
We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.
In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.
September 25, 2009
TechCrunch, Venture Capital, Record Labels and Getting What You Asked For
There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve those goals. Right now, most venture capital organizations and the majority of trade press support an infrastructure that's optimized towards a certain set of results; The question is how we accommodate those who are trying for a different set of results.
One great conversation came from Ev Williams tweeting about tech conferences, and how Twitter would have been received:
I don't think Twitter would have done well at TC50 or Demo. (Likely response: WTF?) Wonder if Google would have. (Search? Yawn.)
I replied, "But @ev, response at TC50/Demo can be determined by reputation & ability to tell a story, both of which your team has." and Ev responded in kind with "Perhaps. But are reputation and ability to tell a story determining factors of success?". At that point, I realized we may have been talking about slightly different things, closing out with the brief observation " Narrative & experience are necessary but not sufficient. They're useful when creating a product, not just onstage."
And the core of it is that TechCrunch 50, Demo, and other tech industry showcase events are really optimized for a certain model of business, following a traditional path of venture capital funding, a certain amount of buzz or attention within a particular community, and (these days at least) an exit route that involves selling to a large incumbent that's interested in that area of innovation. I have lots of friends who have followed this path, and I don't begrudge them their success with it, but I think the logical extension of this path having become well-trodden is that we end up with events that as I mentioned last week, can be fairly criticized as insufficiently world-changing.
Interestingly, that last bit of criticism from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch, saying that companies that had demonstrated their wares at the TC50 conference had for the most part not been very ambitious, was followed by a thematically similar post by Vivek Wadhwa, asking what value VCs have really brought to the world of innovation. I think the answer to Vivek's question is "It depends." but it's a very healthy sign if TechCrunch itself is questioning the fundamentals of the VC model and startups, and perhaps that skepticism justifies my tentative endorsement of the reigning regime of tech pundits.
But the crux of what I see as this reckoning point for the venture capital industry and venture-backed startups is that VCs are starting to look a lot like record labels. That's not a criticism — I used to work in the record industry, and I've enjoyed collaborating with a number of venture capital firms over the years. In both cases, though, the majority of their work is optimized for a certain model of success. This neatly mirrors Trent Reznor's analysis of what it takes for a new band to succeed:
If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:
- Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.
If you're forging your own path, read on.
- Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
As it stands right now, the VC model is optimized for creating new Lady GaGas. I happen to like her work, so it's good that there will be more of those, both in the tech and entertainment worlds. But some people just want to be indie rockers, making a living with the work they love. It's that goal that is underpromoted in our tech trade press, and that perhaps inspires some of the skepticism around what gets hyped up.
That leads, naturally, to Jason Fried's post on 37Signals heralding their new $100 billion valuation. (At least on paper)
37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.
In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”
I had talked to Jason a few weeks ago when he was planning to write this post, and though timing had it being published at the same time as Twitter's just received $100 million in funding, it wasn't designed to be a pointed critique of any particular company or funding event, so much as an overall pattern of not questioning particular narratives in the tech industry. And perhaps even more, it's a criticism of the fact that we don't question the values and goals that those narratives express.
And that was perhaps the point that was missed in Jason's rant about Mint's sale to Intuit which I blogged about last week. People got distracted by the speculation of whether Mint sold at the behest of the founders or investors. (As it turns out, it was likely the decision of the company's founders.) But the larger point was that, by selling to an incumbent from the last generation, Mint's team was expressing a desire for incremental improvement in an industry, instead of radical revolution. There are merits to both goals, but I know that a lot of us who truly love technology and have had our lives and companies transform by it are hungry to see more people be ambitious and shoot for creating revolutionary change instead of evolutionary change.
It's reassuring, though, that despite coming out on opposite sides of a VC funding story this week, both Ev's questioning of how tech conferences and media evaluate startups, and Jason's questioning of how VCs fund and (over)value startups come from the standpoint of asking: Can't we do more? Can't we do better.
It seems clear that the answer is, yes, we can support different outcomes, ones that optimize for more ambitious or radical changes. But we can't keep following the same path and wondering why it doesn't lead to a different destination.
October 22, 2008
Yo Mama's So Fat...
I've long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it'd be fun to throw out some "Yo mama" snaps themed around this year's election on my Twitter account:
- Yo moms such a ho they set up robocalls for all her booty calls.
- Yo moms so fat Russia can see her from their house.
Things took off pretty quickly from there. Lore Sjoberg (you remember him from Brunching Shuttlecocks and his writing for Wired) picked up the meme and ran with it. His were some of the first, and funniest responses:
- Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as "Those Ones."
- Yo mama so fat, she got an endorsement from General Mills. (I would have gone with Colonel Sanders here; That's why Lore is a genius!)
- Yo mama so fat, her other biography is called "The Audacity of Hardee's
Around the same time, a number of other fantastically funny folks joined in the fun:
- Fernando Rizo offers up "yo mama's such a ho, she said she'd sit ON Ahmedinejad with no preconditions"
- Matt Haughey added "yo mama so ugly, the RNC spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup"
- One of my personal favorites, Guillermo Esteves absolutely slayed me with "yo momma’s so fat, John McCain looked into her eyes and saw three letters: KFC." Absurd, obscure, specific — perfect!
As these were taking off, Xeni Jardin, who was dropping some snaps of her own, featured the thread in progress in a post on BoingBoing. Fun! The comments there have lit up with more suggestions, and a Twitter search for other replies now offers up, well, dozens more. I've marked a lot of the best as my favorites on Twitter.
While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.
Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.
A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.
And best of all, even if it is just a bunch of jokes on Twitter, making these jokes is something that anyone can take a turn with. Just like your mama.
July 16, 2008
Details of Execution
Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible.
I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to take back then, but in the months since, tons of people have taken to the little messaging service, so clearly this was no great insight on my part -- it's just a useful, fun service.
But of course, that popularity has not been without its problems. Twitter's gotten a reputation for being unreliable, as a result of its rapid growth. In fact, in many ways, the Fail Whale and its related frustrations has come to define Twitter's brand more than almost anything else.
I'm no expert at these things, but there are a lot of reasons startups fail, and the reasons almost never include the fact that thousands of users clamoring for a service. Indeed, it seems to me that most companies (whether they're tech startups or anything else) fail because of being poorly managed. Put another way, execution is everything.
With that in mind, it's worth pointing out how particularly well-executed Twitter's recent acquisition of Summize has been. I don't know any of the deals of the financial or business arrangements, except that I'm a little disappointed that Twitter isn't maintaining a presence in New York City, instead moving all of the employees to San Francisco. That nitpick aside, the public face of this transition was extremely well executed.
Ev Williams, co-founder and the most public face of Twitter, speaks about the deal at some length in this excellent, candid interview with Techcrunch. (Which site, by the way, may rank as my "most improved" blog of 2008.)
Rumors of the Summize acquisition leaked a few weeks ago, but both companies kept discipline around communications and didn't acknowledge or respond to the conversation. And then, when it came time to announce the deal, the sites had been fully integrated, a lengthy and personable blog post complete with a sketch of some future ideas for integration was posted, consistent branding was in place on the acquired site, and the roadmap for what was going on with employees affected by the acquisition was clearly communicated.
In all, that's a formidable amount of coordination to happen across the country, while business deals are being worked out, and while maintaining secrecy about the fact that it's taking place. And, all of that was done with an eye towards providing a good user experience to their shared customer base.
There are a lot of things to criticize in such deals most of the time, though it seems likely that this will be a successful acquisition, from an outsider's point of view. But what's striking to me is that, as quick as so many are to criticize Twitter (fairly) for technological problems, people haven't been as eager to acknowledge a remarkable discipline and execution on the business side of the company. Frankly, all of those who'd suggested that Twitter should be sold to a larger company seem to have forgotten that almost none of the big companies suggested as acquirers have a history of consistently pulling off this kind of execution. And that's even more true for the smaller innovative companies that they've acquired.
May 9, 2008
Paste to Win! (A Twitter Contest)
If you haven't been following my Twitter account, you're missing all the fun! In between going aggro on teakettles, taking an unseemly joy in crude wordplay, and in general trying to channel my incessant nattering into an attempt at being entertaining. But now I've tried to do something a little bit different, starting a little Twitter contest with some simple rules of entry:
Okay, everybody, it's Ctrl-V time! Paste into Twitter whatever text you copied last, and @anildash me. Best paste gets a prize.
Amazingly, I got 160 responses from over 150 different people, and I've assembled the results into a few categories here for your enjoyment. I removed the date stamps and other clutter from the responses, and formatted the (many!) links into readable formats with some very brief descriptions appended. The categories I've grouped them into include mundane, passwords, links, links with text, actually working, nerds and coders, explainers, jokers, WTF, and pleasant. And then, finally, from all these submissions, I name our winner, along with the surprise prize. Enjoy, and please feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.
Mundane
These were, of course, the perfunctory entries in the contest, people who had the misfortune to have been doing something simple and ordinary when the contest launched. They're all exciting, talented individuals, but just had bad luck at the time with what was on the ole' clipboard.- alexhutton Herrera, Javier
- beuwulf g8 timing....
- blackbeltjones sizewell B
- blogdiva @lolololori ...seriously, i always need to cut and paste twitter names
- davidmohara Walnut Hill and N Central Expy
- DeanLand something tells me this will not win. here goes: (hit ctrl-v) ok (guess who has been IMing)
- gfmorris Massey, Ed; Cagle, Chris --- was sending emails and needed to move some people from To: to Cc:. Lame, I know.
- mdclements May 7, 2008no_watch_me Oops.
- popgloss Go to Sam French and get the play...I have to be at Idol by 3pm. (I had to copy and paste because the 1st text didn't send)
- rcphq "yes!!! twitter im reboot (delete and readd the bot) worked for my IM notifications"
- rey I'm only giving updates to friends. Add me.
- shaneomack ... (I'd paste something, but I just started my computer...no clipboard data to paste! That's good for something, right?)
- torrez 1Z1A715V0355643267 1Z1A715V0355643267
- underoak ?
- USSJoin Kibbutz Hanaton
- vanderwal V
Passwords
I don't have any proof that all of these random strings are actually people's passwords, but I'd like to think we can hack all their accounts with this information.- bgilham lHE)urEfB8!U
- centrs it's confidential.
- cvodb batmarlowe
- jonpederson This could be dangerous, but here it goes... "1237"
- peterme YmHgujE2
- randysouza wETpfAp4
- rayners I can't, it's a password.
- ruby X5PueOOefU
Links
Ah, the bread and butter of Twitter. A surprising number of wacky or topical news stories, along with the detritus of people passing along links to their friends. Almost all of these were originally TinyURLs; I rewrote them with brief summaries for convenience, but may have sacrificed some accuracy in the process.- aaronbailey Paste happens to be a MT URL =) [unreachable test URL]
- arnor [CNET TV podcast feed]
- Assertagirl [seed and plant exchange]
- bigjim [ESRI support forum]
- capndesign [Pizza story from The Onion]
- cshirky [http://SFZero.org]
- danyork [Microsoft Live Mesh post on ZDNet]
- dbarefoot I'm so embarassed by the URL in my copy/paste buffer: [IndieShopping blog]
- dims [SourceForge Java WSDL project]
- djchall [unreachable test URL]
- dwitzel [Scott McNealy video on sharing]
- EffingBoring [http://www.hillaryis404.org/]
- elroy [Chicago Tribune story about ribs fire]
- ericagee [http://bustedtees.com/wikipedia]
- gen [Professional photographer's blog]
- ImGenie [IHT account on Twitter]
- innonate ctl-v this: [political commercial on YouTube]
- jetsongreen my control-v: [Redfin real estate listing page]
- lavidalibre [http://www.scienceandartsacademy.org/]
- Leftsider [ReadWriteWeb post about redesign]
- marywallace [link] [LiveScience story about food appeal]
- mediajunkie [Fortune story on tech guys with beards]
- michellej [Obama shirt on Etsy]
- mortennorby [Hillary political cartoon]
- ndaniel [Nina Hagen video on YouTube]
- nuin [RSS feed for the Cladistics journal]
- openskymedia [Logo for Clearwire]
- pbausch [Amazon thumbnail for Talking Heads album cover]
- Perryesp [Philly.com story about Pittsburg fans plotting against Rocky statue]
- plasticmind [A Skitch image of an illustration]
- raghus [http://feedflix.com]
- rodbegbie [Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra on MusicBrainz]
- ryankuder [http://waiting-for.com/]
- smalljones [http://nccbi.wiki.is]
- smartsculture [NY Times story on concert halls]
- steyblind [unreachable development URL]
- sugeneris [Diversion Wednesday blog]
- tenuto [NYTimes story on a lost Stradivarius]
- timoni [Wuthering Heights Roleplay]
- tombiro [a box of "stop talking" cards]
- tonx [Photo of eating a coffee cherry] #ctrl-v
- tysoncrosbie [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh]
- watters [Amazon page for iPod Shuffle]
Links + Text
Same thing as the links, but these folks had something to say about their links.- akshayjava http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/feed/atom here is an opportunity for a shameless plug! :-)
- amil "Wow, Barack!...That ain't your &%?! name. Your momma ain't name you no damn Barack." DMX: http://www.xxlmag.com/online/?p=20332
- clamhead http://www.flickr.com/photo... ...Photos from my stepson's birthday party.
- fuzzy Onomatopoetically
Actually Working
The brief snippets that showed up from a few folks indicated they were actually in the middle of doing productive work when the contest began. I take no small satisfaction in having interrupted their productivity.- Bash photography? scheduled for 19 May 2008
- jaysavage Believe me, I sympathize, but IT has no role in this process. ITs role is limited to making sure the computers are plugged in.
- jreighley Vivain called back to check the status on this...
- mat Water flume tests were used to assess the effects of passive drag
- meyerweb Coming to Boston on June 23-24, San Francisco on August 18-19, 2008, and Chicago on October 13-14.
- nichcarlson Jackson's ire this time: the Yahoo board's insistence on $37 a share after Microsoft upped its bid to $33 rather than looking ...
- pamslim Coaching agreements are constructed around specific objectives such as: * Defining the kind of work that you love .. (too big)
- shifted "I hate email like this"
- sighclub here's my Ctrl-V: Should I? Is that a good idea to explore the conversation or would it stifle it?
- tenuto not really sure what that is, actually
- thoughtfarmer After looking at six or eight products last summer, [Hicks Morley] settled on ThoughtFarmer (www.thoughtfarmer.com), server-based
- wayneyeager - Ctrl+v = automateyourbusiness
- wfreds external link to eDM case topics
- zackgonzales Franchise Development 78 Product Engineering 77
Nerds and Coders
Some of these could easily have fallen under the Actually Working category, but I know a lot of geeks, and that manifests itself as a lot of code, errors, system messages and the like showing up in people's copy-and-paste tweets.- Asfaq SL is in the down cycle that precedes slow disappearance or phoenix like re-emergence. Hope its latter
- atonse well i don't want to go to a coffee shop cuz we do the whole find-an-outlet dance
- banky use master go CREATE LOGIN PPENGUIN WITH password = 'PPENGUIN', CHECK_POLICY = off, DEFAULT_DATABASE = siebeldb go use siebe
- bsdeluxe stopping after explicit exit
- chrisfullman 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 (Yeah, seriously.)
- coffeechica insomnia who has long be a voice of reason, passion and technical knowledge here in the world of LJ...
- DanielLight somafm
- elbrackeen Boolifyha3rvey help my PC is way too old and the headphone jack is not working
- intabulas delete from reality where acronym like 'soa%'; - note, credit to @snoopdave since I was copying hiw tweet to email to someone
- JeromeGotangco 33126 1 root 0.0 1164 pause nginx: master process /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx
- jperkins update_pacing_and_reports
- kevinshay Profile::Templates::template_keys()
- knowncitizen Error Type: KeyErrorle_mous "2 hours, 11 minutes, 10,611 files examined, 1,851 duplicates at 77.0 Gb in size. Duplication scan is 1% complete."
- LoganTwedt -- Main.LoganTwedt - 07 May 2008 (my user/date stamp from the internal dev Twiki)
- LoriHC 1777381. thrilling, I know! (it's a bug number.)
- markpasc uh: body{background:#1d1815 url(new-electro.png);} body,h1,h2{color:#ccc;} a{color:#99f;} #pagebody{background:rgba(0,0,0,0.8);}
- marshallyount cgTrackContainerExportScale
- mickmel miz_ginevra (pasting) • Ability to have a blog
- nathantwright
$19.99 - outtacontext (index page) [from a wireframe I was designing]. Maybe I'll do better next time, Anil.
- randomfreak clusterflock
- richardwinchell #farRight { border-top:solid #9bc 1px; }
- rk header = "#{i.to_s(36)} #{t.to_i.to_s(36)} #{o.to_s(36)} #{l.to_s(36)} #{h} #{flags.to_s(36)}"
- sarahsosiak -- [binary image data]
- TheBrad
Explainers
These folks were unsure about what they sent along, so they had follow-up tweets to offer context.
- asimaythink "Portishead veröffentlichen nach 14 Jahren ihr erstes gutes Album"
- asimaythink Which translates to "Portishead finally release their first good album after 14 years".
- digitalstew -------------------------------------
- digitalstew Seriously, what are the odds?
- dunq Hi guys In the last couple of hours I've become pretty impressed with postfix, and rather less so with courier.
- dunq I hope I don't win with that one.
Jokers
I suspect that not all of these were the actual content that would have been pasted into Twitter without some editing taking place. But I don't mind so much.
- elbowdonkey command-V says: that'd be a donkey=
- essl pregnant mothers in mexico give birth to stillborn monster babies hideous deformed two-headed monsters
- fimoculous No more fucking models.
- ghostwhispers Anil was working late again. Hey let's GTD, said a voice. It was Merlin, his hair mussed seductively. Anil's heart raced. At last. ...
- gknauss Crtl-V: Man, that Anil Dash guy is just a complete bastar--
- theonetogoto Okay, everybody, it's Ctrl-V time! Paste into Twitter whatever text you copied last, and me. Best paste gets a prize.
WTF
Delightful non-sequitirs.
- aburnett23 Sonoran hot dog
- AndrewCrow "Dude, I'm sure the burning will subside."
- camworld Mercedes 380K: Only one with removable Hardtop and orig specs. No car like this. Made 1934, Black, Leather. Price: 3,500,000 Euro
- ckolderup oh no, semantic polysemy! we've never had to deal with that before!
- csessums patched with rat stubble from a barber's dust pan
- cwaxler civil case Tiffany brought against eBay
- drothschild iT WAS A QUEER, SULTRY SUMMER, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York
- jessamyn Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto th
- joeks "Stop tainting the waste stream with pieces of wood and old underwear!"
- lowery a chewy malbec
- mattl Ctrl-V: the freedom to wear shoes whenever your pinky toes are not hooked up to transcutaneous electrodes
- miketempleton orange_botline
- skampy - AIM IM with zoestoe. 9:48 AM is pregnancy an STD? i'll bring the dental dams just in case.
Pleasant
Consider all of these runners-up in the contest. Almost all could have fit in one of the other categories, but they ended up here because they put a smile on my face.
- akselsoft I hope I'm mistaken.
- avemii 10k Monkeys w/ Typewriters
- brandonmeek every good boy does fine
- cookthink This stripped-down non-Sicilian, non-caponata caponata came out as my favorite.
- DaveTitle INT. EMPTY STAGE CASTING DIRECTOR Ok, number sixteen please. Jon shuffles meekly onto the stage, clearly uncomfortable, barel ...
- fauverism Ctrl-V (Shitting a brick)
- jacklail ATLANTA (AP) _ People who sleep fewer than six hours a night -- or more than nine -- are more likely to be obese.
- jbrotherlove my last Ctrl-V = are you a good kisser
- jeffarena and by kick butt, i mean getting stomped by 12yr olds online.
- kenlotich sootiest
- KnowMiracles Jake Warga's
- lisaphillips o/~
- Lossofmemory "suckit Rob - you are not as good as you think you are...in fact you suck"
- MaryHodder fifteen/fifty-one: a num neologism used to describe the optical illusion creatd by "cool-mom" who look 15 from back, 50 from front
- melissagira Faithful readers know there is but one thing that will make me crawl over broken glass, head down, ass up, and that thing is Jarv
- oski huey lewis and the news - the power of love
- patricking "waitaminnit. you expect your readers to want access to your last hundred printed pieces? i'd reconsider that."
- racerrick I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You want answers? You can't handle the truth!
- Zotnix groggy
- zuhl Here's what on my clipboard right now: "Obi-Wan Kedoofus"
Winner!
And finally, ladies and gentlemen, our winner, Jessamyn West! Her WTF entry was:
jessamyn Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto th
Jessamyn offers up, after an apology to the rest of her followers, that the full quote she had copied was from a mailing list that she belongs to, and reads in its entirety: "Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto the N-Judah one day and my furry rose bush of a hair bloom parts the crowd, greeted by great choruses of outrage."
It's a striking, vivid, and moving image. And one that's well-deserving of an award, in the eyes of this judge.
In Jessamyn's honor, thanks to Donors Choose, we've funded Whoooo, Whooo Ate What? This will provide 15 owl pellets for dissection by a group of kids in 4th grade . Let's just not tell them what the winning quote in our little contest was, shall we? No need to scar them for life.
April 30, 2007
Cats, Comics, and Closure
As it turns out, there's more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who've emailed and commented with additional links.
First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter's various error messages. That's the first place I've seen the grammar used in official (albeit informal) communications for a company.
More important is some of the additional understanding I've gained about why some forms of kitty pidgin are so delightful. Take, for example, invisible bike and its variations. Part of the delight of invisible item cat pictures is the element of surprise, the realization of where the missing item fits into the picture yields an "a-ha!" moment that's much more satisfying than a more literal image would be. This isn't surprising -- a lot of humor relies on the element of surprise.
But there's something more subtle going on here. If you've ever read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, you might be familiar with the concept of "closure". There are many meanings for the word closure, of course, but in comics, it represents the crucial construct of allowing your reader or viewer to make the final connection with your media. This is wonderful for many reasons -- it's trusting the intelligence and creativity of your audience, knowing that they'll make the mental connection in their minds. It's also allowing for spontaneity and inspiration, instead of constraining the ideas (or humor) of an image to merely whatever the original author created. And most importantly, leaving space for your audience to interact with something as prosaic as a cat picture is just plain fun.
Closure has long been part of the vocabulary of comics.
"See that space between the panels? That's what comics aficionados have named "the gutter!" And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics...If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar."
Of course, other media make use of closure as well -- in movies, our minds effortlessly connect each frame to those preceding and following it -- but comics requires conscious (or semiconscious), high-level closure between every frame.
You need an example. Let's go to the world's worst humorous cat pictures: The Garfield comic strip. Fantagraphics has an astounding writeup of why Garfield sucks so bad, despite what your 9-year-old self thought back in the day.
I was impressed to find that Eric Burns and The Strip Doctor broke down what is most fundamentally flawed with Garfield's humor. Redundancy. The problem with Garfield is redundancy. It's redundant. The humor is. Redundant.
I could tell you about this, but that would contradict the premise. Take a look:
Invisible captions! LOL.
February 20, 2007
Having 'Thank You' Money
One of the goals a lot of people have when they become entrepreneurs is to have "fuck you" money: Enough personal wealth to be able to say "fuck you" to whomever you want.
As is probably evident from my little love note to Twitter, I'm enjoying Ev Williams (and his team) having the freedom to experiment with a slightly nicer version of that freedom. Call it "Thank You" money.
The best part about people being independent is that they can tell the truth. And while this is true for other bloggers (Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, and Mark Cuban come to mind), Ev's probably the most graceful with it. So a rumination a few months ago about Odeo's mistakes sets the stage for an honest appraisal of the challenges faced now that Odeo is for sale.
Pretty much everybody else who'd want to do something like this would have to ask permission from someone else, permission that would likely not be granted. As someone who likes entrepreneurship and working for an independent company, it does my heart good to see others revelling in it as well.
February 14, 2007
Consider Twitter
The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn't expect.
It's easy to be cynical about new sites, especially when one is trying to maintain some healthy skepticism. But sometimes you have to let that critical impulse down just long enough to be optimistic. That brings me to Twitter.
I was all set to hate, or at least scoff at, Twitter when it launched, especially because it was called "twttr" and it just seemed to me like "West Coast Dodgeball". (Dodgeball started here in New York City, and at least for me, caught on with my New York friends in a way that never quite happened on the west coast, even after Google acquired the company.) In a way, it's unfortunate that I have ended up liking Twitter, because I had a bunch of better titles in mind for this post if i hadn't. (See the table below.)
If you haven't tried it, Twitter is a simple service that lets you send simple status update messages to your friends via SMS, IM, or a very basic web interface. Those messages are then sent to everyone who follows your updates, using any of the communications methods available. Simply put, it's a buddy list or reply-to-all form of group communication for media which didn't really have them. And Twitter lowers the threshold of participation to being just a straightforward prompted text area. That simplicity echoes the updating interface for some of the best applications, such as the original (circa 2000) Blogger posting box. A lot of my favorite sites today have similar features that prompt for participation, like Vox's Question of the Day or the similar feature on Serious Eats.
Twitter messages are also persistent. The persistence of casual conversations has been key to the adoption of blogging. It's a response to the frustrating sense of impermanence that permeates most communication that takes place via email, IM, or SMS, and Twitter honors that need for a sense of history in the things we say to each other.
Plus, Twitter lets you use whatever medium is most convenient, like all good social apps. I've learned a bit about connecting the web, SMS and IM from LiveJournal's experience with LJ Talk, and the djabberd platform that powers it. Put simply, if your social network doesn't work when you're not sitting in front of your computer, your social network doesn't work.
This idea of adding persistence to instant messaging and status messages is extremely powerful, whether it's LiveJournal's celebrated "current mood" status, or the BuddyGopher service, which was an extraordinarily prescient service that provided a bot which would log all of your buddies' away messages. The service became a casualty of AOL's (now largely remedied) closed IM platform., but today, AOL itself even provides some views of this kind of IM status data on the AIM site.
That sort of platform or media flexibility pays dividends; I still never use Twitter via SMS, only via IM and the web, but it works seamlessly for me and all my friends who are on SMS. I wouldn't have become a user if the technology had limited me to texting on my phone. That's part of the measure of Twitter's success: An unexpected use.
And I think we'll see more of that kind of unanticipated creativity going forward. Already, lots of people on my friends list are using "@username" to direct personal Twitter messages to one another -- essentially sending individual IMs over a public medium to someone who might well be using IM on the other end. I wouldn't have predicted that, and I bet it's only a matter of time until Twitter lets you convert @username messages into its own D USERNAME syntax.
If I hadn't liked Twitter:
- Wither Twitter?
- Reconsider Twitter
- I'm a Twitter quitter
- Twitter, Please.
- TWIT R DONE
And this highlights a key point -- good social media platforms are profoundly adaptive. The platform behind the technology was originally built for a different purpose. That's true of many of the greatest social network applications; Just as Pyra begat Blogger and Game Neverending begat Flickr, a lot of the infrastructure for Odeo helped create Twitter.
Finally, Twitter seems like it's a product borne of passion, and I can see all day every day it's made by a team that actually uses the service extensively. That's important, and helped inspire some of my fondness for the service. It definitely helped me overcome my initial skepticism. Fortunately, I had the chance to tell Ev and some of members of his team in person that their site is one of the few new services to come along that actually feels new.
And of course, as we've progressed from updating entire web pages to just updating blog posts to now entering one-line updates on Twitter, the only logical next step is for us to move on to just updating emoticons. :)
Some related posts:
- The starting line is not the finish line, which was largely inspired by
- Ev's post about starting Obvious Corp.
- LJ Talk and TxtLJ, LiveJournal's open source Jabber IM and SMS integration.
- Making Something Meaningful, one of my posts I keep referring back to.
In this case I'm referring back to wanting meaningful technology because I know the criticism of Twitter is "I don't need more random messages popping up on my phone." But I use Twitter like I use Vox, to keep track of friends and family whom I can't check in with constantly, to give me a sense of shared placed with people who are geographically distant. And that's something I alluded to in my earlier post:
[T]he most important things are the things that we arrogantly want to dismiss as trivia. In every aspect of life, the most profound things are so common that if they don't affect someone you love or care about, they can seem meaningless.
What I'd like to see is technology being used in service of helping me share and record those moments. And I'd like to see technology be used to help create those moments.
Still sounds like a good goal to me.