Category: Twitter

Musing about Information and Long Tail and Publish-Subscribe

I’ve been learning a lot from the whole Twitter phenomenon. How, despite its frailties and weaknesses, it continues to attract followers. How, despite it being “down so ***damn long, that it looks like up to me” people continue to build Twitter ecosystem tools. And how it spawns an entire industry around the Fail Whale: the Wikipedia article, the official site and fan club, the Facebook page and even the merchandising sites. And even a Flickr group, where this one, from FactoryJoe, remains my favourite:

So why is Twitter so popular? As I’ve said before, I think it’s about the pub-sub model. People do not want information on a “Hit Culture” basis, they want it on a “Long Tail” basis. Talking about Long Tail, there was a great review of Chris Anderson’s book by Steven Johnson some time ago. Some of the things he said in that article are germane in the context of stuff like Twitter:

It occurred to me reading The Long Tail that the general trend from mass to niche can explain some of this increased complexity: niches can speak to each other in shorthand; they don’t have to spell everything out. But at the same time, the niche itself doesn’t have to become any more aesthetically or intellectually rich compared to what came before. If there’s a pro wrestling niche, the creators don’t have to condescend to the non-wrestling fans who might be tuning in, which means that they can make more references and in general convey more information about wrestling — precisely because they know their audience is made up of hard core fans. But it’s still pro wrestling. The content isn’t anything to write home about, but the form grows more complex. In a mass society, it’s harder to pull that off. But out on the tail, it comes naturally.

Niches can speak to each other in shorthand. I do like that turn of phrase. Now Steven, one of my favourite authors, wrote that some time ago. As technology improves, I think the capacity for niches to carry and embed context in their shorthand also improves. Take for example the audioscrobbler to FoxyTunes to TwittyTunes to Twitter chain: you listen to something, audioscrobbler scrapes the song title and artist(s), FoxyTunes picks it up and creates a mash-up including the song lyrics, the web site, the MySpace or Facebook page, the Google returns, the Wikipedia entry, tracks for sale at Amazon or emusic, and so on. TwittyTunes then takes the url for the FoxyTunes mashed-up page and crunches it into a tinyurl or similar, then posts it as a tweet from you.

That’s just one example. The process itself is there to be repeated for many others, ranging from stocks and shares to planes and trains and automobiles.

Capillary conversations are here to stay. Niches will speak to each other in shorthand. Enabling technologies will get more and more robust. People will learn more about the use of publish-subscribe models. [An aside: there are a lot of people who pooh-pooh pub-sub, claiming that it doesn’t scale. The way this pooh-poohing is done, it reminds me of the way people used to say that Linux wouldn’t scale. Dinosaur death throes.]

Yup, capillary conversations are here to stay. And the sooner we understand that, the better.

Capillaries can carry compressed context

I’ve been playing around with FoxyTunes, installing it in Firefox, getting the TwittyTunes extension. And it’s not just because I like music. I think what’s happening here is very powerful.

Let’s start with Twitter, it looks harmless and gormless, what possible use could it have? After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Let’s see.

First off, I can send messages that look like the one below. I typed it in myself, it described what I was doing at the time.

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What don’t I like about it? Well, it’s not good enough for the 21st century. For starters, I shouldn’t have to type it in. Something should be scraping what I am doing, capturing it in a way I can choose to share with others. Choose, we must remember that word. And what else? Oh yes, wouldn’t it be nice if I could enrich the information I was sending? Provide more information about the artist or group, maybe YouTube video links, maybe Wikipedia links, maybe Flickr links, maybe even the homepage of the band or group. How about a link to the song itself, so that someone else can sample it, try it out, decide for themselves if they like it? Maybe even a way to search for more information, and the tools to buy the CD or DVD in physical or digital format?

Chance would be a fine thing, but ….. how can I SMS all that? But wait a minute, the 140 character limit isn’t a real limit, not if I send a short url linking to all that. Or even better, having someone do that for me, a web service like tinyurl.

So now all I need is for someone to build an app that scrapes what I am listening to, figures out what it is, goes and collects the enrichments and conveniences I want to send with the information (band links, YouTube, Flickr, Google, Amazon, the Facebook fan page, maybe a Netvibes collection of related feeds, the Wikipedia entry and so on) and then packages all that into a small space using something like tinyurl.

Which brings me to TwittyTunes and FoxyTunes. Now my Twitter message looks like this:

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It does the scraping, directly out of my iTunes. It lets me choose whether to share what I am listening to with others, song by song. It sends the message on to Twitter. But that’s not where the value is. For that, you, the “follower” of my tweet, need to click on the link, and hey presto, you get something that looks like this:

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You see, this is why I play with things like Twitter. Not because I want to appear cool. But because I am so old and grey and slow that the best way I learn is by playing. Now I can really see how something like Twitter can add value in the enterprise. And I’m secure enough in myself to want to share what I find out, openly and freely. Which is what I’m doing here. [Without a business model or a monetisation plan in sight :-)]

It’s worth bearing a few things in mind. First there was the web. Then there was SMS. Without SMS there is no Twitter. Without the web there is no Twitter. Now we’ve had tinyurl for a long time, but it starts coming into its own when we start using something like Twitter. As a result of all this, someone else could build something like FoxyTunes (which looks like Netvibes meeting last.fm), and then building TwittyTunes to connect up with the Twitter world. And then suddenly everything else waltzes in to enrich what we can see and do, ranging from text to audio to video, from search and syndication and conversation to fulfilment.

What strikes me is the power manifest here, the power of connecting simple things like SMS and tinyurl and Twitter. Small pieces loosely joined, as David Weinberger said.

We are moving into a world where open multisided platforms will dominate, with simple standards and simple tools connecting up wide open spaces. We are seeing it happen now. This post is not about FoxyTunes. Or TwittyTunes. Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Google. Or Amazon. Or iTunes. Or Flickr. Or YouTube.

It’s about all of them. It’s about all of them, and the apps we don’t know about yet, the ones that will emerge tomorrow. How we can find ways of bringing all of them together and moving information around them, linking information between them, enriching and sharing that information beyond them.

By the way, we do stuff like this in the enterprise already. This is what we use e-mail and attachments for, this is why we use mailing lists and address books and spreadsheets and documents and presentations. All the things we’ve grown to love.

Or, in my case, hate. If you’re like me, you’ve had it with those tools. Absolutely had it. H.A.D. I.T. They are so not fit for purpose. Or. looking at it another way, there is a generation of tools out there that are so much more fit for purpose.

We’re not dealing with firehoses any more. We’re dealing with capillaries, as I discussed in my post yesterday. And these capillaries carry and distribute information nutrients, and process and eject information waste and toxins. The real power of all this lies in the increasing transportability of context.

Oh, incidentally, in the past, I’ve found the tools for grabbing screenshots frustratingly complex and time-consuming, so I’ve tended not to use them. It is fitting that this time around, I could do all this easily. Because of a project called Jing, and because I then had simple and seamless ways of going from Jing to Flickr to iPhoto to ecto to WordPress. And guess how I found out about Jing? Through someone’s tweet.

Also incidentally, it would be worth looking at the role played by the opensource movement in making sure we can move around so freely between all these applications. Which brings me to a strange conclusion. More a hypothesis. Am I right in considering the possibility that VRM is necessary only because everything is not opensource? That good opensource obviates the need for VRM? Doc? Don? Steve? Chris? Chris? Anyone out there?

Freewheeling about social media

This post is about Twitter, and yet it’s not. I’m trying to deal with a bigger issue.

First, do take a look at these two posts: Phillie Casablanca’s Ten Commandments and Paul Downey’s Twit or Twerp? Both are excellent; I have the privilege of working with both these guys, and I’m delighted that we have people who really try and understand what’s happening with social media.

While the discussions in the post are primarily about Twitter, I think the issues they discuss extend further. It’s worth looking at three aspects of any such discussions:

1. Prescription. Phil talks about his discomfort with the word “commandment”, and how he looked at using “etiquette requests”, but felt that it didn’t have the requisite ring or zing. We need to be careful in positioning any of these statements as guidelines rather than diktats. There are many people using Twitter who wouldn’t necessarily have the faintest idea what IRC was, and wouldn’t know a microformat if it hit them in the face; this doesn’t make them bad or stupid. In fact one of the biggest attractions of contemporary social media is the lowering of historical barriers, and we have to make sure that we, collectively, concentrate on providing advice and assistance and best practice rather than prescription or diktat. We need to be heading towards a place where we can say “If you want to get the best value out of Twitter, and if you want to make it easy for others to obtain value from Twitter, then you should consider doing the following things, and not doing the following things”.  That’s how I read the two posts, and I will strive to become more of a twit and less of a twerp.

2. Polarisation. For whatever reason, the industry I have found myself in just loves polarised debate. Everything, just about everything, is 0 or 1, black or white. Big-endians versus Little-endians. What’s happening right now is that our walls are coming down. “Vendor” power is shifting to the customer. “IT Department” power is shifting to the customer. “Standards Body” power is shifting to the customer. While we need new standards, we need to be sure that we don’t pave the cowpaths, create new sets of polarised standards “on behalf of the customer”; we need to be comfortable with letting the customer decide. Sometimes it’s going to feel like helping a child grow up and discover things for himself; as “parents” we cannot do the learning for them. [Reminds me of my favourite JSB quote: How long does it take for a five year old to become a six year old? One year]. For people like me, it’s about getting out of the way. For some of you, it may be about recognising the continuing existence of “grey”.

3. Personalisation. For many of the people playing with these tools for the first time, there are no rules. They will find ways of using the tools that the creators of the tools haven’t considered; they will find ways of making the tools their own. Whatever we advise, whatever good practices we suggest, whatever standards we come up with, we need to keep one perspective in mind. The newbie isn’t wrong. Just different. We need to encourage the newbies rather than reinvent the ivory towers and holy-of-holies of the past.

Lack of prescription. Avoidance of polarisation. Support for personalisation. These Ps are key, whatever else happens.

Along with passion. And patience. Lots of both.

We’re on the verge of a new golden age, centred around community and participation, as the underlying technology stabilises and becomes invisible. Let’s make sure we get there.

Applauding our own behinds

While returning from New York yesterday, I read David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable on the plane. Viciously funny. But that’s not the point of this post.

In a chapter entitled What Is The Sound of One Hand Shopping, Rakoff quotes the inimitable Lenny Bruce, saying:

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass

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I love flamenco, in all its forms. The music, the fingerstyle guitar playing, the dancing, the atmosphere. I also love what Lenny seems to be saying, which I personally interpreted as “Be careful, don’t take yourself too seriously, otherwise passion becomes pretension.”

And I think we do need to be careful. We of the blogosphere and the A-listers, the technomemes and the Dr Seuss naming conventions and the Everything 2.0, we need to make sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We need to recognise that we’re nothing more than a bunch of passionate early adopters participating in a big and potentially far-reaching set of changes to how we communicate.

When I see the kerfuffle surrounding the Scoble-Facebook face-off, I begin to wonder. I really begin to wonder.

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.