Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.
A few weeks in, the rush of everything being new subsides and you start to feel lonely. No problem, you think. You make friends easily. It’s only a matter of time before you’ve got a bunch of great folks actively calling you to join them to hang out, right? All you have to do is muster the courage to get out of the house and meet people. The only question is, where do you go?
Assuming your goal is to meet people you’d actually want to get to know and build lasting relationships with, would you start by heading straight to the biggest, loudest night club in the city? Or would you head down to the neighborhood bar, cafe or coffee shop, where your neighbors were all hanging out after work? Given the choice between the two, my bet is that you’d chose the latter. So would I.
Starting a blog and being social online for the first time can feel a lot like a move to a new city. It’s lonely at the beginning and it takes a while to build a reputation and develop relationships with people who you like and respect, and who are genuinely interested in you and your content.
How you go about developing relationships online should closely mirror the way that you do it offline. You’ve got to go to a place where people share your passions and interests, introduce yourself and start a discussion. When deciding where to go, try to pick places the same way that you’d pick a place to hang out offline. Virtual spaces have distinct personalities and atmospheres all their own that reflect the collection of personalities of the community. Huge blogs like TechCrunch and Gizmodo will be just like a massive nightclub – tons of noise and lots of superficial interaction. On the other hand, smaller communities and personal blogs will feel more like a local watering hole – and with fewer people and less noise, you’re more likely to engage in higher quality discussions and build meaningful relationships quickly. If you find one of these spots where you meet people you like that feels like it’s got your kindof vibe, devote some time to visiting frequently and sticking around and interacting a lot when you do. You’ll find you have a lot more fun, build better relationships, and before long, it’ll be a spot where everybody knows your name.
Jesse Stay, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer recently posted some interesting and insightful pieces on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. There are some solid arguments made in each post in support of Twitter’s move, as well as on the dubious and controversial nature of Twitter’s suggested users list (SUL). When it comes to the issue of eliminating spam and improving usability, I fundamentally support what Twitter is doing. That said, Dave Winer makes some excellent points on Twitter’s SUL. The three posts in tandem are great reads if you want to understand the core issues and what’s going on. There are also many gems in the comments.
The iPhone 3.0 upgrade software was just released and, within minutes, #iPhone and #iTunes popup on the trending topics list as the iPhone community rushes to their computers to upgrade their phones. Between the time I ran the search and took this screenshot, there were over 1000 new twitter posts mentioning #iTunes – literally in the space of a minute. Hundreds of people are all having similar problems, asking questions, helping each other. Amazing. And Apple is no where to be seen in the stream. Lesson learned…get your community manager and techies monitoring Twitter when someone pushes the “RELEASE” button.
Facebook is drastically changing the way we communicate and live our lives. Understanding where it came from, and how and why it grew so fast, is an important part of the story – one we should devote cultural and anthropological research to. If you think Facebook is just some “Internet thing” that kids do (and a lot of adults surprisingly still do), then you’re completely disillusioned and you need to get your head out of the sand. The reality is that there is a whole generation of kids moving into their teens right now who will never know what it’s like to live in a world without the Internet and social networking…their rise marks the end of an era. And you know what they all have in common? Facebook. We’ve got to wrap our heads around how it affects our psychology, our culture, and how we can best use it to create and strengthen (not dehumanize) our communities and our relationships etc. I think that telling a more complete story of Facebook’s history is a critical piece of the “community 2.0″ puzzle.
Note: This article I wrote was originally published on ReadWriteWeb and syndicated to the New York Times on May 10th, 2009.I have posting it here and closed comments, but I have participated heavily in the discussions on the original ReadWriteWeb posting and posted additional thoughts and clarifications on the matter on this blog. Please follow the links to ReadWriteWeb and to my follow up post to view the full discussion.
By now we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg‘s success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young Founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in it’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbe’s 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World’s Youngest Billionaire.
If you’re a heavy Twitter user like me, you may be familiar with the awkward, tense feeling that can grip you when a non-Twittering friend or co-worker decides that enough is enough and it’s time to confront you about your “habit” (Twintervention?). Regardless of the events that lead up to said awkward moment, the blank, confused-slash-condescending look that says “Whyyyyy do you do this?!” is often the same. It’s happened to all of us at least once, hasn’t it? This situation doesn’t get my knickers in a twist anymore. I’ve armed myself with a canned answer. “I’m accelerating serendipity!” I’ll say with a boyish grin, and then wait for a response. On a few occasions, I’ve been able to turn this traditionally “ack” moment into a productive discussion. Let me explain…
This week was my friend Angie Swartz‘s first week hostingTwitterTalkRadio on WSRadio.com. I first met Angie at the Charity:Water Twestival at the beginning of this year in downtown San Diego. She’s a superstar. She’s a successful entrepreneur and currently runs several websites including SquareMartiniMedia.com, twitterattraction.com and sixfiguremomsclub.com.
On Monday she shot me a message asking if I would call in to the show and we had some great pre-show discussions about self branding and using Twitter as a tool to build your business network. Here’s a link to the podcast where Rieva, Angie, Alan and I discuss transparency, authenticity & going local with Twitter.
Congratulations to Rieva and Angie on a successful first week! You guys did a bang-up job.
[tweetmeme]I recently made the decision to stop feeding my Twitter posts into Facebook. The reason is simple – I continually get negative feedback from my non-Twittering Facebook friends on how I update my status. Some hated how often I updated, some didn’t get what “@” and “RT” was, some didn’t like that they couldn’t join in on conversations that weren’t actually taking place inside Facebook’s walls, and some people didn’t like how “impersonal” most of my updates were (I use Twitter like a shared feed reader a lot).
Not all the feedback was bad, of course – I don’t mean to exaggerate. I’ve gotten quite a few Facebook friends into Twitter because they noticed the difference in how it’s used and saw the value. No, my choice was because there’s a significant difference in status culture between the two platforms, and, because I’m a heavy Twitter user, I would continue to violate social rules inside of Facebook (and piss off my friends).
Recognizing the emerging differences in status culture is an important step to understanding how people behave on either platform and how we can shape interaction with good design. In this post I’ll offer some insights into the differences between Twitter and Facebook, how they change people’s behavior, and argue that the differences in public-ness and prive-ness cause fundamental and important shifts in how people interact and use each platform.
Friends vs. Followers: How We Group Contacts And Establish Relationships Matters
How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our (implied) relationships (and social responsibility to others). Makes intuitive sense, right?
On Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 12pm, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States of America. As we all watched Obama being sworn in front of the massive crowd, Twitter lit up with excitement worldwide. One of Flowing Data‘s latest visualization projects shows us just how excited the Twittersphere was over time as Obama got sworn in by displaying the tweets worldwide that included inauguration with a “positive attitude” as the event took place. You’re literally watching millions of people broadcast positive vibes 140 characters at a time.
The map starts early Monday morning. As the day moves on more people wake and tweet at a steady rate with increasing volume as the time comes nearer. Europe gets in on some of the action when the US goes back to sleep. Tuesday morning comes in with a new beginning in the air. Then boom, it’s time, and Twitter bursts with excitement.
The moment that Twitter really starts to groove is when Obama gives his speech and is sworn in. I think that this little clip is absolutely mind-blowing. Watch for yourself.
[tweetmeme]All you systems theory buffs out there are probably familiar with the concept of “emergence”. For the rest of you, here’s a quick and dirty definition: Emergence describes the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. The idea of emergence, although it might sound complicated, is important when thinking about social media because it helps us understand how cyberculture has developed and how our rules and rituals that we use when we interact online continue to evolve. When social scientists who study cyberculture find a new pattern of behavior or ritual that is unique to the online world, they often call it “an emergent behavior”, which is a fancy name for a social rule that a lot of people follow that no one person mandated. I’d like to talk a little bit about this in the context of a platform we all know well: Twitter.
The Evolution Of The Retweet
Since it’s launch in July 2006, Twitter has grown to over a million users. According to TechCrunch, as of March last year, Twitter users were firing off around 3 million tweets a DAY. Chew on that for a second. There’s a community out there of over a million people generating millions of tiny messages daily from a variety of different devices and applications (web, mobile, desktop clients etc). What’s important to realize (for the purposes of this discussion) is that the creators of Twitter never published a list of social rules for its users, and said “GO”. No one ever told us how to use the platform. We just did. We figured it out as we went along. We watched others. We copied. Those of us who were innovators tried new ways to “tweet” and other people noticed and copied us. Over a year and a half after Twitter’s launch, over a million of us that use Twitter know that it has social rules and etiquette – these are the patterns that emergence describes. We reinforce those rituals every time we use Twitter by following the rules we’ve made for ourselves (and by reprimanding those that don’t).
Retweeting is a perfect example of one of these emergent, ritualistic behaviors in Twitter culture. Retweeting has rules associated with it, and the behavior has evolved over time. I remember when it was common for people to full-on write “Retweeting @username” in front of a tweet, burning up their 140 characters just to give another person credit. Necessity for brevity, of course, has resulted in “RT” being the universally understood indicator over time, but there was no rule that said they had to give another person credit at all… but they figured out a simple way to do it because they wanted to. Because it’s the right thing to do. Within months, everyone was doing it. Now it’s a mainstay of Twitter culture…at least until someone else comes up with a better, briefer way to re-broadcast someone else’s message while giving credit. Who knows…maybe it’ll end up being just R @username. Culture and social rules are always evolving.
Why Entrepreneurs & Developers Should Care About Emergent Culture:
Since Twitter opened up it’s API, countless numbers of entrepreneurial-minded developers have released applications and services that integrate with and build on Twitter (my favorites include apps and add-ons like Adaptive Blue’s Glue, Tweetdeck, and Tweetsville for the iPhone). Here’s the problem – because of Twitter’s growth and popularity, there are A LOT of people developing apps that don’t really do anything different! Some of them look neat, and the UI is pretty, but the fundamental functionality across many apps is the same, which is BORING. There is nothing remarkable about something that takes what everyone does already and repackages it into something that just looks prettier. What a waste of creative energy. A shiny new UI that does the same thing still makes it difficult for consumers to decide what to use. The applications that DO stand out, however, are ones that have taken into account new, emergent behaviors and built them into their design.
Tweetdeck and Tweetsville are perfect examples of apps that stand out for this very reason. They were some of the first to incorporate cultural trends and add automated “Retweet” functionality into their UI. The developers saw an opporuntity to take an emergent behavior that was cumbersome (cutting and pasting someone elses message and adding “RT @username” to the message) and automate it. Brilliant. THIS IS DIFFERENT. It adds value. In all the noise, these were apps that got noticed and talked about because they were fundamentally more useful because the developers were in tune with the culture.
Some Insights for Developers and Entrepreneurs:
So what can we learn from this example? Here are some quick insights for entrepreneurial-minded developers that want to pack a punch in the market…
Developers, when you build a completely new application or service and release it into the world, people will use it in unexpected, unanticipated ways. Watch the crowd. Notice the patterns. They are tell-tales for what your next design steps should be. Never stop tweaking.
Entrepreneurs, if you’re building on top of an already-popular platform, you need to be keenly aware of the existing culture and tailor your service or app not only to what people are expected to do, but to incorporate emerging behaviors into design decisions. Repackaging existing functionality into something that looks good isn’t enough and won’t get you noticed. Culture is always evolving. Finding emerging behaviors that create needs that haven’t been addressed yet by others is a golden opportunity ripe for exploitation.
Every platform has it’s own culture, social rules and etiquette, but many online social rules are common across platforms. Take these common patterns into account. These are your staples that should never be ignored.
Heavy Users who are very popular on a social service act like beacons that guide the behavior of large followings. Watch them for patterns. They are the ones that will pick up on new and useful behaviors and broadcast them to the rest. They are people who turn early patterns into mainstays of culture.
When a service forces people to interact in new ways, new patterns are born. Innovators aren’t always the people who are heavy users from the beginning. They are just the creative ones that see and exploit opportunities to use a service in new ways, sometimes unintentionally. Because these people aren’t necessarily popular, you’ll have to work hard to identify them and engage them for feedback. Make giving feedback easy. Contact people directly who are doing new things with what you’ve built. Ask them why. The answers you get might floor you.
Credit Where Credit is due:
Tim O’Reilly was the very first person I ever saw “Retweet” someone else’s message (it must have been some time around ETech 08, because that’s when I found out about Twitter) so I just wanted to offer him an “innovator” shout-out. I remember seeing that word “Retweet” and thinking “huh, a twitter-footnote! How honorable and transparent!” From then on I did the same. Tim, if you’re reading this, do you remember who the first person you ever Retweeted was?
The web is evolving rapidly and it’s nice to see that social networking is evolving right along with it. If you frequent top tech sites like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, you’ve probably heard (or read) the term “Semantic Web” hundreds of times this year, but in this blogger’s humble opinion, all the hype and hoopla hasn’t produced much that most of us can actually use, especially not in the social networking arena. Until now. A New York-based tech startup called AdaptiveBlue has just released a FireFox browser add-on called Glue that just might turn traditional social networking on its head. In my estimation, Glue’s release represents a significant leap forward in social browsing and is likely the first of many semantic technologies that will begin changing the way people connect and have more meaningful interaction on the web. Here’s just a few reasons why Glue is a game-changer:
Semantic Technologies (Can) Put Our Networking Activities In Context
One of the key insights that Glue was built on is that the things we like and the content we consume say as much about us as anything else, and that connecting over things and content we love with others is meaningful and enjoyable. With Glue, AdaptiveBlue has built a contextual network that uses semantic technology across the web to automatically connect people around the everyday things they are interested in – books, music, movies, celebrities, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants and more. Here’s the awesome part…because the network is decentralized and distributed across popular sites using the AB Meta Markup, it doesn’t matter when or where the users visit things, Glue recognizes the object and connects people around it. For example, Glue recognizes a particular movie (like IronMan) as the same object on IMDB, Amazon, Netflix, RottenTomato, Fandango etc. and treats it the same way. If a friend on Glue interacts with that movie on any site using the AB Meta Markup, that interaction will show up on any other compliant site for that object in Glue. There is no destination site, the network is always in the user’s context anywhere they are interacting on the web. Here’s a quick video that illustrates exactly how Glue works and how it builds networks of people around objects:
If you’re an avid online social networker you’re aware of just how many social networking, tagging and microblogging platforms are out there. Most of us don’t have time to respond to voice mail and e-mail every day, let alone check our Twitter updates and Facebook accounts and Flickr friends. Simplicity is key. The beauty of Glue is that it doesn’t force you into a one-or-the other decision when it comes to the suite of services you use, and it doesn’t force you to build a new profile on a new site. Rather, it adds value to all your existing services by allowing you to dynamically build a portable profile as you browse the web that loads (for other Glue users) on all of the sites that you claim in Glue seamlessly. You don’t have to change your habits at all. The value here is that every Glue user that visits any of your sites (your blog, your Twitter stream, LinkedIn profile, Flickr strean etc) sees the Glue bar, adding variety, and context to every profile without you having to do anything but claim a page. For people who are into lifestreaming, this is a major value-add. Plus, it gives people an easy way to find all of your content on the web. The profile provides quick and easy hop links to all of your sites with just a few clicks. Here are a couple of screenshots of my various profiles around the web (you can see that the Glue bar shows on all of them)
Providing Meaningful Filters For People And Things
After spending a few months on Glue (in private beta), what I’ve found the most interesting is that I can use people as filters for (finding and analyzing) things and use things to help me filter and analyze people. The biggest problem I have when I interact with people I’ve never met on text-based platforms like Twitter or FriendFeed is that for the most part I’m doing so with very little personal context. The biggest frustration I have with social media in general when it comes to meeting new people is being able to answer one big question “What is this person like?”. Glue is awesome for giving someone’s suite of profiles “a common personality” because it rides on top of all of their profiles (as discussed above). Here’s what I mean…
Let’s say I find a guy named “JoeTweetalot” on twitter. All I know about Joe is that he’s got a short bio on his page that just says “I live in San Jose, I work at a software company and I’m awesome. DM me!”. Doesn’t really tell me much. BUT he’s on glue. Right on! So his profile drops down and I surf his stuff….now I know that Joe is interested in these things:
The stuff I can see in his Glue Profile acts as a great filter for his personality – I already have an idea of what Joe’s sense of humor might be like, I can guess his approximate age, I know he’s interested in similar topics as me, and his music and food tastes are also similar to mine. It says instantly “do I have stuff in common with this person or not?” Which is the most frequent question I have that rarely gets answered on the social web. Being able to share a bit of ourselves in this way allows us to find more meaningful connections with others and allows us to connect over the things we love.
Final Thoughts
With any luck, we’re going to start seeing smarter technologies for social browsing and networking that provide better context and meaning to our interactions online. Glue is the most noteworthy of such smart technologies available to date. While still in its infancy, the service represents a significant advance in how people can use semantic technologies to pull their many services together (meaningfully) and find new ways to find each other and connect over shared interests. The novelty, simplicity and portability of Glue is a major plus in such a cluttered social networking world and shows us the way forward. But don’t take my word for it…try it yourself. Get Glue.
Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with information, so I’ve started taking steps to trim some of the fat from my info-diet. Along with reducing the number of people I follow on Twitter, and using Facebook’s new feed features to help focus my news to people I care most about, I’ve also made one significant change in my feed reading habits by making a switch from my traditional feed reader to iGoogle’s new widgetized interface. Here’s why the new features in iGoogle rock my world…
Finally, A Dashboard That I Can Scan
I probably track around 100 blogs in my RSS reader, and by most measures, I think that’s a modeset number. Do I read every post from all of those blogs? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of time. Like everyone else, I’ve got 15-20 favorites that I track actively and the rest get lumped into the “You Have 687 unread posts” category. Still, with a traditional RSS feed reader, I’ve had to dig through my feeds on the left, expand them and scroll through posts.
No More. Now I use iGoogle’s dashboard (as my browser’s homepage) to keep up with my favorite blogs RSS feeds, friends, email, facebook…all of it. I now spend a fraction of the time reading that I did a week ago. Everything you add to iGoogle shows up as a draggable widget, so you can design your own layout, organize your stuff into tabs, and it’s all right there on your home page. The dashboard design makes keeping up a heckofa lot easier because it makes the content scannable (FINALLY!).
I won’t bore you with all the details of how to set it up, because it’s a snap, and besides, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Here’s my current iGoogle home page…
iGoogle Dashboard Widgets Add Extra Value For Social Networking
While adding tabs on my iGoogle Dashboard the other day, I stumbled on an awesome new feature. I created a tab called “Friends” and it automatically populated the tab with Facebook functionality, GoogleChat and Gmail widgets. I even added a twitter gadget. It’s nice to know that the good folks at Google are accurately anticipating their users wants and needs. Here’s another 1000-word screenshot. How useful is this??!!
The fact that Google is figuring out that people need a good agreggation service for all their feeds (beyond just RSS readers) is awesome, and I think the new iGoogle interface is an indicator of changes to come with how feeds are organized and presented. Here are some final thoughts…
Design Makes A Difference To How People Consume Information
I’m a big believer in the idea that design shapes behavior. The fact that design impacts reading behavior is the reason that magazines and newspapers invest so heavily in layout, typography and graphic design. This is a no brainer, right? I know I’m not saying anything innovative here…so why haven’t companies like FriendFeed and NewsGator innovated with the design of their layout to improve readability? It’s all so…linear. Linear design is fine (and even elegant) until you start pulling a lot of different types of content into one stream. FriendFeed in particular has gotten so useless to me, that I don’t even bother with it anymore – Tweets, photos, bookmarks, comments…it’s all there in one big no-context pile that you have to sort through. I quit trying a while ago because it’s just too overwhelming. I know I’m not alone in this. Why doesn’t every profile have a dashboard of all their stuff sparated out for readability? It’s all coming in separately, so why lump it all together ina long time line and make it less useful? In an asychronous world where people are creating lots of different kinds of content, do I really care that a tweet about lunch came right after a bookmark of a stock report? Time doesn’t add enough context to make it meaningful, especially when you add more and more users to a stream.
In short, the problem isn’t that there’s too much data…it’s that the current design and organization of the information presented by popular aggregation services lends itself to clutter. FriendFeed in particular should take note of iGoogle’s new widgetized dashboard and show us something fresh, new and organized. Just aggregating a ton of services isn’t enough. You have to help your users orgnize and make sense of it all. Services that do that well are going to win in the long term.
Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.
