Month: January 2008

Things I expected to see in Twitter (but haven’t as yet)

When I first heard about Twitter, and during my “observe and learn” time, I worked on the (mistaken) premise that people would answer the Defining Question. “What are you doing?”

And because of that mistaken premise, I was expecting to see things happen that I haven’t really experienced so far. So what was I expecting? Let me try and explain. I’m going to call them “favours between friends”. There appear to be five types:

  • Community-based favours
  • Location-based favours
  • Experience-based favours
  • Activity-based favours
  • Returning favours

If I was an acronym-type person, I guess I would call them CLEAR favours. But I won’t.

Community-based favour example: “Is there anyone out there who knows anything about left-handed Wii wands?” Hoosgot may become a good vehicle for all community-based activity on twitter.

Location-based favour example: “Hey, if you’re going to the Apple Store then could you please buy this for me and bring it over?” “If you get the time to go by the MOMA store, I’d really appreciate it if you could pick up a Mondrian mousemat for me”.

Experience-based favour example: “I ate at TAO last summer. You just have to try the Kobe beef while you are there. Unmissable.” “I see you’re planning to watch Kite Runner. Could you tell me if it is really suitable for a 13-year old? I hear there’s some child sex abuse scenes in it.”

Activity-based favour example: “How did you feel going up to the observation level of the Empire State Building? Did it tire you, could you feel any change in atmospheric pressure?”

“Returning” favours: Any of these done on a reciprocal basis, but in covenant relationship. None of this you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours manipulative nonsense. People do favours for people because people are  naturally social, generous, want to help others. Altruism is real.

So that’s what I was expecting. That people used Twitter to signal what they were actually doing, about to do, had just done, and so on. That as a result of the signals, others could participate in a bigger something, building on the signals. That as a result of this bigger something, everyone would gain.

This works when Twitter is a community, with a real understanding of “commons”. When a person has an @someone-else conversation in Twitter, it should be because both people think the community will be enriched as a result. Otherwise the conversation should be taking place somewhere else.

These were my thoughts as I began to play with twitter. I’m still learning, but I’m definitely not seeing what I expected to see, other than Hoosgot.

Of course conventions like L: and @ and ++ are useful, but only if there is some place the novice can go to to find out about such conventions. Otherwise it will become an elitist fad.

I like Twitter. I think it has real value. And, by the way, so does Facebook. A subject of a different post.

Old Man’s River: Dersu Uzala

Following on from yesterday’s post, carrying on with the experiment:

Recommendation 2: (Film)

Dersu Uzala. I could pretend to be a high-falutin’ film critic and tell you all the reasons why Akira Kurosawa is such a fantastic film-maker, why Dersu is such a fantastic film, how many Oscars and Globes and Bears and Roses the film won, and so on. But I’m not going to, because I don’t know how. What I do know how to do is to point you at imdb in case that helps you.

I was around 19 when I saw the film. Normally, wild horses would not have dragged me into a film made by a Japanese director, in Russian, with stilted English subtitles, and only available for viewing at the local Soviet Cultural Centre (if memory serves me right, this was on Lower Circular Road, maybe 10 minutes walk from where we lived in Moira St in Calcutta). When I found out that it was over two hours long, and that I couldn’t smoke in there either, wild elephants could not have dragged me in there to see it.

Yet I went. Dragged there by my girlfriend. Amazing, the wild-horse-power of the fairer sex. And sat there, rebellious, mute, uncomfortable, nicotine-withdrawn, trying my best not to show any of this.

As you can imagine from the above, I was not predisposed to like the film. Anything but. Yet, after sitting quietly for 140 minutes, I could not forget it. The acting, the photography, the starkness of the landscape, the raw yet deeply moving relationship between the two main characters.

And I love the quote for which the film became famous amongst its small but select cult following:

Why man live in box?

Yes, why indeed?

So if you get the chance, rent or buy the film. It’s powerful, it’s moving, and it teaches you something.

An old man’s river: Introduction

From today, just as an experiment, I’m going to recommend something every day to you. It could be a book I’ve read, a film I’ve seen, a song I like, whatever. Be warned, this is a provisional post.

Why am I doing this? As I said, as an experiment. It came to me while I was watching Chuckleball Jailhouse Jocks a couple of days ago, when they did a skit of Tiger Woods, calling him “the most endorsed man in history”.

I found the whole concept of endorsements insane. First, you’re expected to take advice from someone you don’t know; then, you’re expected to take that advice on subjects that person is not necessarily knowledgeable about; and finally, you’re expected not to care that the person is being paid a gazillion dollars to give that advice. Excuse me while I throw up.

The advice I am most interested in is impartial and independent and friendly. Which is what recommendations should be. So I thought to myself, how am I going to get recommendations? And the answer came: By giving them first. The next question was “Why should people bother?” And the answer came “They will, if they get value from the recommendations you make”. And the final question was “How can I be sure that the recommendations I get will be worthwhile?” And the answer came : “You can’t be sure, but you should expect some aspect of collaborative filtering to kick in”.

There are other things I want to learn about during the experiment, other questions I have kicking around my head.

One, since advertising is dying, just how will recommendations fill the gap? What can we learn from the way recommendations work, what will help us get VRM right?

Two, while we’ve seen how recommendations work in broadcast media and in Web 1.0, just how will recommendations work when there is no broadcast media? What does it mean to go to a truly P2P model for recommendations?

Three, both advertising and broadcast media go hand in hand with “hit cultures”. Recommendations and P2P models are much more “Long Tail” in their behaviour. [My thesis is that hit cultures were necessary because of the sheer wastage inherent in the traditional advertising-meets-broadcast-media business model. So much money was wasted in the grapeshot marketing and the layers of crap in the produce-to-consume chain, no one could afford to carry many lines as it were.]

Four, the Three Witches (Advertising, Broadcast Media and Hit Cultures) are not going to take change lying down. What will their response be? How will we know?

These are the sort of things I want to learn. This is how I will know whether my experiment was successful.

So. Step 1. Let me recommend something. Just because I like it. Preferably Long Tail and not Hit Culture. With reasons as to why I like it, and giving clues that will help you decide whether you might like it. And in most cases, they won’t be new stuff. They will form part of this Old Man’s River.

Recommendation 1. (Song)

Season of The Witch. Written by Donovan Leitch and performed by Michael Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, available on Super Session. A fantastic song on a fantastic album. You can listen to song samples and even order the album if you want via this link. [And no, I do not have an affiliate program with Amazon, not my style. Not unless they allowed me to point the affiliate earnings directly to a charity of my choosing.]

Why do I like it? It has this folk-rock meets hard-rock feel to it, strong bass lines, a syncopated beat. You can actually hear the words they’re saying, and the words make sense when strung together. It’s written by someone who could sing and play, not just write. It’s sung by people who care about what they do, talented musicians who saw what they did as a vocation, a calling, and not just a way of making money. It’s recorded by people who saw that as a vocation as well. It was done as part of a single long recording session, none of the pampering that goes on today.

All of these things are actually trivial when you consider the real reason. It’s a bloody good song performed by great musicians.

So, if you haven’t heard it yet, find a way. And let me know what you think. I will move on to recommendation 2 tomorrow, and try and keep things going until the experiment is successful.

Does asymmetric tweeting work? or will we see “natural deselection?”

Phillie Casablanca recently observed via Twitter that “following @gapingvoid and @scobleizer is like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. When they’re on a conference call.”

I found this comment fascinating. As far as I can make out, the primary reason Phil would get this sensation is because he’s unable to see the tweets that Hugh and Robert are responding to, and as a consequence he’s unable to place the context in which these two are tweeting.

Why is this the case? This will always be the case where two people have asymmetric connections in any social network that works like Twitter works. In fact, where you have gregarious and extreme social animals like Hugh and Robert, if anything the effect is accentuated. If Hugh has twenty times as many people he’s talking to, when compared to Phil, and their overlap is 5%, then you see what happens. 95% of the conversations that Hugh is in are only partially visible to Phil, and Twitter is colourless without context.

Yessirree, Twitter is colourless without context. It becomes boring, insipid, tasteless. And ultimately very frustrating.

So what does this mean? I wonder. There are a number of possibilities.

One, people de-friend those who exhibit this contextless behaviour. [Please understand, this is not because either Hugh or Robert are choosing to make noise by posting often. This would be a wrong interpretation. It is only because they are in more conversations with more people that such an effect happens. And that per se is not wrong.] Let’s call this “natural deselection”.

Two, people learn to filter this effect manually, develop a scanning habit that learns to skip the contextless tweets.

Three, twitter itself gets a granular control facility that allows people to balance out the gregarious. Not sure how it will work, but there could be a possibility that a person is restricted to seeing the tweets between a friend-pair provided both sides of the conversation are friends. But then this would only work in the open @person conversations.

Four, the twitter topology itself shifts towards a trusted network model, where friends of friends are friends as well. This may be unattractive to many early adopters.

I for one don’t care. I think it is right that I am symmetric about my connections, anyone who follows me I will return the favour. So far I haven’t refused anyone once they pass a simple sanity test which consists of a quick scan of their friends,  tweets and blog page where available. If there is no information available, I wait.

I believe there is a lot of serendipitous value in Twitter, value that I don’t want to throw away with the wrong rules. So I won’t be deselecting people as yet, I want to learn more about this medium and what it can do.

Early days yet.

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