140Char

I actually posted my thoughts on Twitter, earthquakes, and how major news sites are going to increasingly lose their advantages on breaking news on my other blog, www.thewayoftheweb.net, but obviously it also needs flagging up here.

I’ve tried to provide ways in which the news companies can adapt and evolve to embrace the new technology, but whether or not they’re capable of thinking in terms of changing quickly enough will be interesting…

I’d love to hear more thoughts on how applications like Twitter are affecting other people’s news diet…

Incidentally, you can see our first thoughts on earthquake messages on Twitter here. And it was online before the BBC, and around the same time as CNN!

At a University where I once worked, we had an Economics Professor visit us from Turkey. He introduced himself and said “I love to gossip!” I was mildly surprised. It seemed an odd thing to proclaim. Most of us won’t even admit that we enjoy gossiping. We aren’t going to put a sign up and say, hey over here, I love to gossip. But s’truth, why are pubs and coffee shops so much fun? Because we stop to have a chat with the other locals, pass the time of day, complain about the exchange rate (or the weather if you are British!).

Do you remember at school though, we had forms of gossip that were distinctly unpleasant? If you saw your name up on the bathroom wall, you knew you were in big trouble. What I love about Twitter is that it is infinitely more civilized. We have all the fun of gossiping but usually about something hopeful, positive and engaging. We do use it to rant, but the rant is usually a reaction to something, not a vengeful, premeditated attack.

I think Twitter is a great improvement. I wonder if these schools who have problems with knives and guns could improve their school cultures but allowing Twitter?

As with the earthquakes in the UK and China, the first I heard about the earthquake today in America was on Twitter. Whereas most news sources will be busy subbing their efforts, people are updating Twitter whilst events are going on around them.
Great for anyone who wants to find out about the news as it happens - worrying for the people who could end up in danger because they’re glued to their PC/mobile instead of finding a doorway!

I have just found another great Twitter Toy: Twitter World. You watch the public time line unfold on a world map. It is oddly relaxing!

Nathan explains here how he set it up.

I was just reminded that a while ago, I started a “Twitter Favourites” set on my Flickr account. I was finding that there were some real Twitter gems that I wanted to keep a hold of.

So now, any funny or memorable quotes that I see on Twitter get screen grabbed directly to Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuchsiashock/sets/72157604373466543/

Do a search for “screen shot upload to flickr” or similar and you’ll be able to track down some software giving you more or less one-click uploads to flickr.

Sometimes it’s amazing how much of a story can be relayed in just 140 characters. Hence the name of this blog, and hence why I’ve picked this post by Xeni Jardin. Narrative, tragedy and loss, and comedy, all in one Tweet!

A couple of conversations on Twitter had me dreaming up a great Twitter experiment.

1. Organize two very large groups on Twitter and make sure they have very few common links at the outset.
2. Now give one group red shirts and other one blue shirts. Don’t tell the red shirts that the blue shirts exist, or v.v.
3. Then after a while, get some red shirts to follow blue shirts and v.v. - but don’t mention the shirts. You are the only person in the know!
4. Check how many red shirt people start to wear blue shirts, and v.v.

• Network theory suggests that we mimic what other people do, without realizing we are doing it. So red shirt wearers are likely to wear red shirts more and more often. As are blue shirt wearers.

• When we introduce red shirt wearers to blue shirt wearers, they will wear each others’ colors without thinking.

• Network theory also tells us that we are affected by what our friends’ friends do. We don’t need to know our friends’ friend either!

• So if some red shirts start talking to people who wear blue shirts, other red shirts might start wearing blue shirts.

It is fairly alarming that we are so easy to influence. But there are two sides to the coin. It not three!

• We influence back. if you want a tidy room, make it tidy! People who come in will be tidier than if their first look is an untidy room.

• We also have many influences competing for our attention.

I think the key is that we have to budget for competition. How much work do we have to do to win? And what will we do if we come second? Toby Moores, the CEO of Sleepy Dog, budgets one successful commercial idea out of 200. How well do we understand the processes of creativity, innovation and group influence? How can we give kids experience of the give-and-take of creativity, innovation and group decision making?

Any experiments for that?

Hello, Mr Plod!

Today I received an uninvited email from LinkedIn, and unlike most uninvited emails, it was actually useful. I generally regard LinkedIn as a internet-based protection racket - you get nothing for your money except avoiding a threat that wouldn’t be there without them. But today they may have turned themselves into the neighborhood “bobby” - alert and passing on information that keeps us ahead of the game.

LinkedIn got off its . . .

I have done some digging and it seems that I have received a weekly Digest Email on a Tuesday morning British Summer Time (GMT or near as damn-it). I will continue to get emails if anyone writes directly to me.

The weekly email is extra, and tells me whom of my contacts has updated their profile or asked a question. I am not sure if LinkedIn edits the list. I am not sure if they consolidate the information. Generally, updates are kept for 5 days and are limited to 15 entries. So possibly I will know what happens on every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays (!) and if you happen to be in the top (?) bottom (?) 15 on the list!

I liked it though. It was nice to see at a glance who is doing what. It is nice to know whether I should take time to log in or not. It is nice to have a reminder that my profile should communicate to people (give some idea who should beat a path to my door). It was nice to have contacts’ questions and though I have a packed day, I thought I had specific expertise or contacts that might be useful and I fired off five pretty comprehensive answers.

So LinkedIn has put in a cheap service that

• Saves me keystrokes
• Acts as an alert
• Reminds me of the game (communicate, don’t dump)
• Lets me show off expertise and gain expertise by phrasing professional material in answer to different queries
• Builds the community by reinforcing my own contacts and prompting me to introduce people to each other

This is a brilliant example of smart social media design.

• Keep it quick
• Keep my attention
• Engage me in an interesting task
• Help me learn
• Welcome my interaction

And how is this related to 140 chars?

The email I received from LinkedIn is an email - nothing more. They could have sent it sooner.

I perceived it as more though. The email has a Twitter-like quality.

So what are the great attributes of Twitter?

Instant, easy, personal - yep those are the obvious surface features.

I also see INFRASTRUCTURE.

• It is Just In Time.

We flick a light switch. We use it when we want and for how long we want. We pay for what we use.

And we don’t have to be too bothered. At Bucks08 Media Camp, we talked about social media being infrastructure. Twitter is definitely infrastructure. Proof? Look at how incensed we get when Twitter fails. It is supposed to be like lights and water!

By sending me an email, LinkedIn transformed itself from the equivalent of generator in my back garden that I have to fuel with diesel from a jerry can to the national grid. A light switch! Quick and easy to use. Ignored when I don’t want it.

I am redundant!

It’s a funny idea that I need to be redundant to get a good service. I suspect marketing guys get this all muddled up! It is a matter of “levels of analysis”. I might come-and-go, but the “flock” or the “crowd” must be there for the system to work, and as I come-and-go as me, marketers still need to talk to me and make me happy and to achieve the crowd effect.

The right metrics though are not “click-through”. The national grid doesn’t try to persuade us to flick our light switches on and off! I did not have to answer any of the questions on LinkedIn. What matters is that somebody answers them! We need to generate a handful of good replies. That is the metric of interest.

I could continue with the grid metaphor but a pub works better. I want someone friendly to be in the pub when I go in. I don’t want to have to be there if somewhere else is more exciting. A nd I don’t want to talk to the same people every time. The pub has to attract just the right number of people to make it likely a good friendly crowd will pitch up so that a good friendly crowd pitches up!

If I switch back to the grid metaphor, the national grid doesn’t care when I switch on and off. But if something happens which will change the pattern of switching one and off across the country, such as the minute’s silence before Princess Diana’s funeral, then the engineers have to quickly re-envision the service. They need to redistribute the load fast because the pattern of need has changed.

The metric we need is a system metric. Can the system respond rapidly to demand at many different points (all unknown in detail) with just the right amount of impact - not too much and not too little! .

It is public.

Well, LinkedIn isn’t. It still runs on the club model - ownership, exclusivity, 1.0. At the moment I have to manage my network. It is akin to keeping candles in every room in case the power goes off. Or akin to having a back-up generator complete with jerry can of diesel.

If the network was fully public, how would I receive questions I am interested in? I don’t know but I bet someone figures that out quite fast.

Ideas?

It allows division of labor.

Flicking on the light switch is easy. Using a wall socket takes a little more thought. Using the fusebox is more complicated but hey, in this apartment at least, you don’t have to re-wire the fuse (been there, done that!). There is some gradation in skill but we get to the point that being a consumer requires little skill.

There is some heavy duty engineering and finance behind the light switch, but as consumers, we don’t need to know much about it to play our part.

It is sophisticated.

The engineering and finance behind infrastructure is heavy-duty. A lot of people who know a lot of deep stuff have to work together and the system is no longer transparent to us, or necessarily to them. The credit crunch tells it all. We need some smart legislators to be able to see ahead and see what is necessary to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed!

Social media for politicians! Who is seriously onto this issue?

So that is my offering for the first part of this week.

• Through no action of mine, I am getting a useful email from LinkedIn.
• One small, cheap action on their part, seems to me to be a giant leap from a platform in the cost-of-doing-business park to a far more attractive platform like Twitter.
• And the transition helped me think through some of the key factors concerning social media as infrastructure (any more that I haven’t thought of?)

As managers of infrastructure, we will be

• Just-in-time - seen and not heard - doing well when we are invisible and cheap to the consumer
• Thinking about a system in which individual demand affects collective demand, and v.v.
• Managing a system that has capacity points - sizes that allow demand, financing and technology to be in balance
• In the public domain, therefore requiring political input and political output
• Some sort of futuring because both our technology and our needs change

And all of this out of one email from LinkedIn?

Twitter sets a good example. It looks frivolous. Quite often turning on my lights is frivolous.

What else out there could learn from Twitter?

[Well this post could be 140chars for a start!]

I thought I’d start republishing and compiling some of the best Tweets I see. Not only do they illuminate what happens inside Twitter for anyone who hasn’t jumped in, but they can also be funny, inspirational or downright odd…and a good balance to listing business cases!

First up appropriately comes from one of the co-founders @ev, quoting one of the more famous and oft referenced users, @zappos.

Twitter (And Friendfeed, Jaiku and Pownce) application Twhirl has now added support for open-source microblog platform Identi.ca. And, as Cnet explains, it’ll have a feature that Twitter users have asked for - push updates which send updates direct to the client, meaning no need to keep refreshing so much, and theoretically less load on the Identi.ca server.

I’m intending to take a look at the new client, and start posting more to Identi.ca, as I have a sneaky suspicion it will be one of the two or three microblogging sites with enough longevity to reach the mainstream. And I’m not sure Plurk will make it. (I’m not the only one).

Each group will have a demographic, whether it’s different due to age, class, geography etc, just as the current social network sites separate out: Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo. But I think there will be more crossover, as people look for a site to jump to if the Fail Whale hits Twitter, or the A-Team turn up at Plurk. And an open source platform with less server load seems like a good place to build a back-up Twittergeddon bunker in times of need. After all, social networks seem slow, and blogs almost glacial if you have a serious microblog addiction. And IM won’t let you interact with enough people at once.

Twitter has enough established users. Identi.ca could become the archetype for open-source reliability. But who else can sustain themselves and offer something interesting? Place your bets in the comments!

*Plurk A-team pic on Flickr by daysies.

Twitter users were a bit shocked to suddenly find their pages looking rather different at 11pm on Thursday, July 17, 2008.

Sadly user error meant I didn’t capture a screen grab, but I can say it was more of a lick of paint than a rebuild, with a ‘rougher’ look, and less clean lines…

Considering the second round of VC funding, the purchase of Summize to become Twitter search (which I’ve been meaning to comment on until life interfered), and the hint of a redesign, I think there’s enough evidence of major movement in Twitterville. Could this be the start of a rapid move to money and repaying the investors?

Edit: Techcrunch managed to get a screencap. Probably why they get a slightly bigger audience than 140char!

Log in to TwitterBlocks and it will show you who you have been chattering with and who they have been chattering with.  Excellent!  Some Twitter apps tell you who you have been talking to .  I like to see a picture of conversations and networks and this is it.

Who I speak to, who they speak to and who speaks to me?  Just for the past day but immediate pictorial feedback!