Top Posts – Steffan Antonas

Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters

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?

Twitter’s got a fundamentally different connection model than Facebook that allows for both one-way and two way relationships, whereas Facebook forces a mutual relationship at the point of connection. The difference can be illustrated in the following way (I’ve split these into 6 different types A-F)

Twitter Relationships:

- Type A: I follow you, but you don’t follow me and anyone can see both of our updates. (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

- Type B (A reversed): You follow me, but I don’t follow you and anyone can see both of our updates (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)

-Type C: I’m Private, You’re Public: I follow you, but you don’t follow me AND my updates are protected so that you can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type D (C reversed) You’re Private, I’m Public: You follow me, but I don’t follow you and you’ve protected your updates so I can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)

- Type E: We follow each other publicly, and anyone can see our updates/conversations (Public Friends = Stronger relationship)

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

FacebookRelationships:

- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)

As you can see, Twitter’s connection-creation model allows a user to create a large combination of weak and strong ties to other users online based on their own interests, regardless of existing real-world relationships. For example, I can follow celebrities like Diddy or Shaq around and send them “@” messages and interact with them, without implying a strong relationship between us (Type A & B). This stands in stark contrast to Facebook’s model which implies a strong relationship from the get-go – a user has to physically “accept you as a friend” before any interaction occurs (Type F). Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways (which I’ll cover in a second)

Side note: Andrew Chen has a great post titled Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts that highlights some of the strengths of Twitter’s one-way follow design. If you’re interested in interaction design, I recommend it. Here’s a nugget from his post that illustrates a little bit of what I’ve covered above:

...[Twitter's one way follow model] makes it possible to have interactions with lots of people (@replies), but your time line only has information you care about, as you don’t have to follow folks you’re not interested in…[additionally] some profiles are inherently appealing to a cross-section of users – these include celebrities, companies, media content, etc. – and the one-way follow design supports all of these nicely…

Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Where We Interact Changes What We Share And How We Behave

I had some great conversation s with friends on Twitter and FriendFeed today on how status culture is evolving in the online socialsphere. There was a strong consensus that, although many of us started out using our Twitter and Facebook status updates in similar ways (i.e. for personal updates AND for conversations over ideas/interests), the cultural differences between public (Twitter) vs private (Facebook) spaces has shifted the way almost all of us craft and share our posts in the following ways:

- Personal status updates that are an expression of “self” and “real-life connection” are a cultural norm and are expected when (only) strong, private relationships (Type F) have been established and mutually agreed to as part of the system’s design. However, these types of updates are frowned upon when weak public relationships (Types A-D) are also included in the overall social structure. When someone builds an audience of users based on weak-relationships (Types B & D), being personal too often is seen as violating the cultural balance of “signal to noise” (noise = personal minutia).

- Status updates that are an expression of ideas and shared interests tend to dominate status culture when public, weak relationships are built into the social system. In these cases, discussion and information sharing is the norm and a user’s authority is built around participation and adding value. Personal minutia (in the name of adding value) is therefore kept to a minimum as a sign of respect for the overall community (Jeremiah Owyang has a great landing page where he explains how he uses and doesn’t use Twitter that is instructive).

In addition, when what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform:

- Platform Usage Splits: In general, we conform to social norms and separate “personal and private” from “less-personal and public”. When discussing the differences between how they used Facebook and Twitter, my friends Vada Dean and Stephen Christopher said it perfectly in under 140 characters – we get a split in how we use each platform – one gets used for “self” and “personal connections” (Facebook) and the other gets used for “ideas” and “interests” (Twitter). While there is some overlap, the reasons we log on and use each platform are fundamentally very different, despite the similarities in the status functionality.

- How Much We Participate Changes: When expressions of “self” and “connection” dominate the status culture, participation (seems to) decrease; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion around updates remains lower. This may be because users have less to connect over (personal status is used as news that people keep up with, not discussion points). Conversely, when common ideas and interests domainate, participation increases significantly; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion increases. This may be because more updates are used as discussion starters.

While there are clear differences in the types of updates we send in public and private space, it’s always always always about increasing ambient awareness for the user – it’s just that the type of information and interaction that we’re looking for and expect to find when we log on changes.

Public Vs. Private Space – How It Changes Who Participates and Affects Adoption and Why The Differences Are Important

Most people fear Google and privacy is gold. In my opinion that’s one of the reasons Facebook has amassed close to 180 million users. For most people, not all virtual space is “safe” space where they feel comfortable interacting. When people feel safe, not only do more of them sign up, they interact more and share more of themselves, in more ways, and both the variety and volume of user-generated content (hint: data!) you get increases. For that reason private space will always win the revenue game (at least for the foreseeable future). The majority of people out there will completely opt out of ANYTHING public simply out of fear. The knowledge that someone you don’t know (or worse, someone you DO know and don’t like) can find you and judge you will always freak out the majority of people – because exposing themselves represents a lack of control over who sees and uses their content. Facebook has spent millions putting up walls to create “safe” space for it’s users and implementing elegant organization of privacy controls and THAT is why they’ll win.

For anyone interested in data-driven business models, Robert Scoble has a great post up titled Why Rob Diana is right: Twitter gets the hype while Facebook will get the gold that hits on some of these points. Scoble admits:

[Privacy] is exactly why people tell me they use Facebook instead of Twitter. So, Facebook has the numbers (about 180 million for Facebook vs. about 10 million for Twitter). It is also why Rob Diana is right: people will put more intimate stuff, like having a baby, into Facebook rather than Twitter. Only weirdos like me like sharing intimate stuff in a public forum and having conversations. Hint: for every weirdo like me, there are 1000 who are like my wife and only want to discuss that stuff with their “true friends.”

In short, the appeal of privacy is something developers and social media services need to look at closely, because it seems to be something that the majority of people want, and may be a prerequisite for mass adoption in the future on ANY social service. Most of the world isn’t comfortable yet with the idea of living in public, and my never be. Afterall, Facebook has shown people that control is possible and made them USED to it – and they’ve set the bar high for the rest of the services out there. It’s a cold hard fact: Google-protection and strong privacy controls so significantly lower the social costs attributed with adoption and interaction that most social services cant afford to NOT to build them into their systems because of all the potential users they’ll lose that demand it as a prerequisite to adoption.

Summary

I’ve made a lot of arguments in this post, so I’ll try and sum up with a few bullet points.

- 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 relationships. Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways.

- What we share and how we interact are products of community’s culture. Communities where strong private relationships dominate seem to favor interaction around “self” and “personal connection” whereas communities where weak public relationships are the norm seem to favor interaction based on “ideas” and “interests”.

- When what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform.

- The lure or strong privacy controls for users may increase adoption on social services and improve the variety and volume of interaction on a variety of levels. This an insight that is important for developers of social media who are concerned with generating large user bases because they seek to build revenue streams based on selling data.

While this is a lot to digest, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on any of these points in the comments. I’d also like to thank Matthew Clower, Nic Luchiano, Stephen Christopher, Vada Dean and Mikey Reiach for their significant contributions to this discussion.

**Featured Image Credit

The Best Techniques For Building Your Tribe On Twitter The Right Way

Twitter is one of the most powerful community building tools available today for two reasons – simplicity and transparency. With the right tools and techniques, you can use Twitter to find people who are like you and share your passions, and build strong networks quickly, effectively and cheaply. The ability to form tight networks in this way is almost unprecedented, and is one of the main driving forces of the Twitter Revolution. In this post I will discuss tools and techniques for using Twitter for effective personal networking and building a tribe, not for using it as a marketing tool.

For People Who Want To Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool

There are several ways to use Twitter as a tool, and they require fundamentally different mind-sets and strategies. If you wish to use Twitter is a marketing tool (that is, to decentralize your efforts and get your message out to as many people as possible, quickly) there are tons of posts already on the web that are great resources for you. Here are some of the best that I’ve found from a couple of Twitter superstars:

How To Use Twitter As A Marketing Tool, by Guy Kawasaki – Easily Some of the best advice on the web about how to develop a large following quickly and getting the word out about your brand.
How To Grow Your Follower Numbers To Over 10,000 in a Week, by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger – How to effectively create a marketing campaign that generates a large Twitter following fast.
How To Get More Followers On Twitter – a link Roundup by Darren Rowse of 7 great articles that focus on growing your following.

For People Who Want To Use Twitter For Personal Networking and Building A Tribe

Effectively building a personal network with Twitter requires a very different mind-set than the ones covered in the posts above. Doing it in the right way requires you to take a long term approach, to be discerning about who you spend time connecting with, to let go of the “you need 10,000 followers NOW” approach, and to focus and target your efforts on connecting with the right people in order to create deeper and more meaningful relationships. Remember, effective networking is about building a tribe/community of people who trust you, believe in your message and actively engage you and your brand.

Networking Isn’t About Broadcasting A Message, It’s About Creating Relationships

There’s a great video clip on YouTube (included below) where Seth Godin answers the question “Is Social Networking Important For Business?”. I’ve transcribed his response because it perfectly illustrates the difference between networking that works and networking that doesn’t. He says:

“There’s two kinds of networking. There’s the networking of giving your business card out to lots of people, showing up to lots of cocktail parties, friending a lot of people on Facebook, counting how many people follow you on twitter. That’s worthless. It was worthless in the real world and it’s worthless in the online world. The networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. Doing it reliably and repeatedly, so that over time people have an interest in helping you achieve your goals, ’cause they have a stake in it.

You can do that offline

You can do that online…by leading a tribe, by connecting people, by giving people access to the information and resources they need. Because then over time, they’ll do the same for you. You’re not doing it for the punchline. You’re doing it because the act of doing it is so beneficial.

What I really don’t like is online is the superficial networking, that all the thousands of people are [doing]…friending everybody else…why? Right? That doesn’t count for anything. It’s just a waste of time.

With Seth’s words in mind, I’ve crafted the rest of this post to provide answers and insights to deeper questions that people who are concerned with personal networking should be asking themselves, like:

How do I find other people like me, who care about the same things?
How do I find and connect with authorities and influencers?
How do I determine who the most important people in an influencer’s network are?
How do I become an authority/influencer myself?
How do I build and lead a tribe?

Excited? Here we go…

**How and Where To Find People Who (Are) Like You**

I want to make one quick point before diving in. The brackets in the heading above are purposeful. When we say I like you, most of the time, what we’re saying is I am like you. One of the most rewarding things about taking part in social media is finding and connecting with people who you (are) like, and who (are) like you. The surest way to quickly build a tight-knit online tribe is to find like-minded people and engage them. Being online is a lot like meeting up face to face. People who are like each other, connect with one other a heck of a lot quicker online than ones that don’t. Chemistry and mutual interest come out in text too, even in 140 character chunks. You can form faster, tighter connections with people you are like because you share passions and interests, care about the same things etc etc. People who are like you are everywhere, and being able to identify those connections and use them to your advantage to network effectively is key.

Doing this well takes some up-front work on your part. The key to finding people that are most like you is that it requires you to take a good hard, honest look inside yourself. Ask yourself what are the things you really care about? What are you passionate about? What communities are you already a part of that focus on those things? If you try and discuss things you’re not that into, just because you want people to think that you’re into them (for whatever insecure reason), you’re going to have a tough time with building and strengthening your tribe. People will figure you out quickly and you’ll come off as disingenuous. Being authentic is the web’s #1 rule. Becoming an authority and leading a tribe requires you to take a long term view and concentrate on topics you love for months, even years. So figure out who you are, find your voice and then project that consistently.

Fortunately, if you have an internet connection and a browser, you already have free access to every tool you’ll need to find people who are like you, you just have to know where to look. Here are some of the best.

1. Twitter’s Search Function

This is the best place to start when you don’t know where to start. It’s easy. Pick a topic you love, and hit search.twitter.com. It’ll show you all the people that are talking about that topic in real time. The more targeted your search keywords are, the more likely you are to find what (or who) you’re looking for. For example, I’m a blogger and web designer and I love WordPress. “WordPress themes” is a good keyword phrase because people don’t talk about WordPress themes unless they’re bloggers. A search on this phrase is going to find me bloggers who use the same platform as I do. I instantly have something to connect with those people over. You can do this with any topic, but target your keywords to search for activities and things you love, software or platforms you use etc. Searching on keywords like “vacation” isn’t necessarily going to find you a hardcore traveler the way that “backpacking” would. As soon as you hit search, see who’s talking, find a conversation you like, follow that person and jump right in.

*Tip: If you consider yourself a power-user and want to kick the search up a notch, you can also use Monitter, which provides a Tweetdeck-like Twitter monitoring service.

2. Take Advantage of Existing Community Clusters

People gather around experts, companies and services; They listen to and learn from experts, and get news from companies and services they care about. For example, people who are interested in venture capital probably follow high-profile VC bloggers like Fred Wilson, Brad Feld or Guy Kawasaki. Likewise, users who follow WordPress‘s Twitter stream are likely to be bloggers who use WordPress. Finding these experts and services that talk about topics and news that you are interested in is the first step. Once you do, find the cluster of people who follow them – you can access these lists for free at the top right of any Twitter account’s home page. Think of them as qualified leads. The more nichey the expert, service or company, the more targeted the audience that they’ve drawn will likely be.*

*Tip – avoid following services or companies you find in a follower’s list – these users are following only to get noticed and will not add value to your network. They may reciprocate, but it’s a dead node that will probably never interact with you or anyone from your community.

3. Use Contextual Networks (Social Browsing) To Find People Like You

One of the web’s most useful social networking tools for finding and connecting with people like you is Glue. Scott Gilbertson of Wired recently called it “the single most useful social networking tool [he's] ever encountered” and it’s one of Read Write Web’s Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008. Glue integrates seamlessly with Twitter and allows you to network with people around objects (like books, movies, stocks etc) as you browse many popular sites on the web and you can easily post your interactions directly to your Twitter stream. The guys over at AdaptiveBlue have done a terrific job with Glue, and they are about to roll out some new conversational features that will make the service even better. I’ve written a long, very detailed post about the benefits of using Glue to network with people and how it works with Twitter, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. I’ve found it to be an indespensible tool that should be in every Twitter user’s toolkit. (If you’re already on Glue, you can find my profile here)

Below is a video that gives a brief overview of some of the main features of Glue.

Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

How Do I Find And Connect With Authorities And Influencers (In My Niche)?

The Twitter revolution has given us more opportunity than ever before to find, follow and engage influencers and authorities. There are dozens of services on the web now that use Twitter’s API to access rich, searchable data that lets anyone sort through the clutter to find out who matters and who doesn’t in the Twittersphere (for any given niche). My favorites are:

Twitter Grader – This is one of my favorite “find’em and friend’em” services. Not only does it give you a variety of useful statistics on your own Twitter account (authority, rank etc) it allows you to search for other users world wide for any keyword or location and ranks them by authority. Need I say more? It’s not always clear how twitter grader calculates power and influence, but this is a great starting point to find influencers by niche and geography.

Twellow.com – The Twitter Yellow Pages. Twellow’s website is not quite as slick as Twitter Grader’s but their search function works almost as well and allows you to search by keyword AND location simultaneously, which is a powerful, unique feature. Like Twitter Grader, it returns user results by authority score and gives you instant access to a lot of user profile info like websites and bios. These guys get a hat tip because they’ve done a lot of the work of finding users by topics and categories in a yahoo directory-like way. Need a realtor in your area? Need a web designer? Twellow’s a good place to start.

Mr Tweet – This guy’s gotten a lot of press for good reason. MrTweet’s Service will analyze your network, suggest good people and followers you’re missing out on, recommend influential users to you and update you regularly with stats on your account. The service currently has close to 70,000 followers on Twitter. While MrTweet’s service is valuable, I wouldn’t suggest using it until you’ve been on Twitter for a little while and accumulated a substantial following. Because the data is based on your existing network, the more existing connections you have, the better the results will be. Also, the popularity of the service gives it some cons. The results won’t likely be instant. My request sat in a queue for 4 or 5 days before I got the analysis results back. It’s worth being patient, though. You’ll likely find lots of good people to follow that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

The three services I’ve mentioned above are, of course, not the only ones available to you. There are dozens. The three above are just the ones I use most. Here are some other notable services that I’ve come across that deserve honorable mention:

Web Analytics Demystified’s Twitter Influence Calculator, Top 100 Twitter Users By Influence and Twitter Cloud
Twinfluence.com
Twitseeker.com
Twitterank.com’s Top 50 List
Retweet Radar

How Do I Determine WhoThe Most Important People In An Influencer’s Network Are?

Now that we’ve covered how to find people with the most authority and influence on Twitter, let’s dig deeper. Building strong networks isn’t just about finding authorities in your niche, it’s about leveraging their networks too. Here are two great ways to gauge who the most important people in an influencer’s network are:

1. Dig For The First 20

Did you know that Twitter logs people you follow in chronological order? That means that the very first person someone ever followed will be the very last person you find in their “following” list. Use this to your advantage. Even when an influencer follows thousands of other users, find their first 20. Those are likely the people that the influencer cares most about (and likely knows well offline). No one starts following randomly when they first create a Twitter account. We always start with our favorites (people we already connect regularly with) when we first started using a service.

2. Use Social Network Analysis and Social Graphing

If you really want to go hardcore to find out exactly who matters to a Twitter user, check out Mailana’s social network analysis tool for Twitter. It’s the most advanced tool for this around – way better than anything anyone else has come up with so far. You’ll get detailed statistics on the top 20 people a user messages the most (including DM’s which arent public), as well as a social graph you can use to analyze the users social network. The tool, of course, isn’t perfect because it’ll only show you the people that the user communicates with most, but the two techniques I’ve talked about together will give you a great overall picture of who matters. Here’s a snapshot of Pete Cashmore’s social Network, just so you can get a preview of what the tool does:

Final Thoughts: How To Build Your Tribe and Become An Influencer…

Finding people with whom you have a lot in common and proactively engaging them on Twitter is the first step. Becoming an authority requires you (as Seth Godin said) to consistently help them, refer them, set them up with each other, teach them and give them access to the information and resources they need. But more than anything, it requires you to cement deep(er), long(er) lasting relationships with people based on common interest and cause. This is why building a tribe requires a long-term mind-set. True fans aren’t made overnight. This is THE LIE that gets bought into way too much on the Internet. Superficial friending is useless if you’re trying to develop a strong personal network (of people who would actually be of use to you offline). With that in mind, here are three thoughts I want to leave you with:

Be Consistent and Relevant – To be viewed as an authority, you have to consistently communicate relevant and useful information/help/resources to your chosen area of expertise. Remember, you’re building a personal brand. If you’re connecting with people who love WordPress, for example, Tweet about that a lot. Pretty soon, you’ll become known as a go-to guy. Using targeted information resources like Alltop.com, popurls.com or news from top blogs in your niche to find and aggregate and link to news is a fantastic strategy for developing a consistent, credible voice that people respond to.

There’s No Substitute For Making Offline Connections – I can’t stress this enough. Services like Meetup.com are excellent for finding people on Twitter who get together offline and organize events around mutual interests. Find those groups, join them and attend the meetings. You’ll be glad that you did.

Always Be Linking – Tweetbacks are like trackbacks on blogs. When you consistently link to interesting, relevant resources that your tribe cares about, you show up on those blog posts! Be consistent and people will start recognizing you everywhere as they read. Linking in your twitter posts also establishes credibility and shows your community that you keep up with news they care about.

Emergence: What Developers and Entrepreneurs Can Learn From The Evolution Of The Retweet

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?

100+ Killer WordPress Resources

Below is a list of links to the very best reading out there on Hacking WordPress and building a better blog. I’ve also included a list of links to designers and others who are significantly advancing WordPress through innovative theme development and plugins. If you know of a post or resource that I have not included yet, please add it in the comments! I’ll constantly update this list as I find more of the good stuff.

Improve Your Blog

Theme Hacks

Stylesheet Hacks

Post Hacks

Comment Hacks

Page Hacks

Categories/Archives Hacks

Best WordPress Plugins

Using WordPress As A CMS

The “Get WordPressed” Blog (Added 9/5/2008)

Topics

Blog

Category Top Posts