John Bell: Blog
It's like Twitter on Ritalin
Creeping Inevitability: Search Engines Index Tweets
Oct 28th
Microsoft’s search engine Bing has struck a deal with Facebook and the hot micro-messaging service Twitter, a brash attempt to add real-time web updates to its search results in order to make Google look like a lumbering dinosaur.
While we’re still digesting the news of Bing adding Twitter to its search engine, Google has some news of their own: they’re about to do the same exact thing.
Searching Twitter traffic initially seems kind of odd. Then, after a bit of thought, it starts to sound a bit better. Finally, after a lot of reflection, it starts to venture into the realm of the bizarre. Here a quick summary of the stages of acceptance:
1 — Oddity: Why would you want to add Twitter traffic to a search engine? Twitter is all about quick thoughts between you and your ten thousand closest friends. Search engines are supposed to be good at answering questions, and most questions require more than 140 characters to answer completely. (I’ll blithely ignore the question of whether most people doing searches actually care about complete answers.) On first blush, it doesn’t seem like a great match.
2 — Sense: So why would Google and Microsoft be interested in indexing tweets, then? Assuming it’s more than just a PR chasing-buzzwords stunt (not necessarily a good assumption, but…) how would indexing tweets add value to the core of their search businesses? Well, if you treat tweets more as metadata than search data, it starts to make more sense. A good percentage of tweets contain links, and once you filter out spam you’re left with a lot of links that have been determined–by actual humans!–to be interesting. Machine intelligence is great, but humans are still better at figuring out which pages are worthwhile and which aren’t…this is the idea behind Mahalo and the like. If Google and Microsoft can mine that data to improve the quality of their hits, indexing tweets suddenly makes more sense.
3 — Nonsense: But if that’s the goal, why make the tweets themselves searchable? That’s going back to treating the tweets as actual data again, which seems questionable at best. If people start to see their tweets show up in search engines that will change the way Twitter is used. Right now it’s treated as an ephemeral medium; incorrectly in theory, since Twitter is already searchable, but given how well Twitter’s search engine works, it might actually be true. With stories popping up all over the place reminding people to be cautious about what they put on Facebook or MySpace, does Twitter really want to be included in the list of services to fear? I’m sure there are good reasons–probably money–for Twitter to get involved in this deal, but it’s not without risk.
via Bing Partners With Twitter and Facebook for Real-Time Search and BREAKING: Google Announces Search Deal With Twitter.
Passing Through: 1stfans at the Brooklyn Museum
Sep 30th
The Brooklyn Museum has a program running where they’re trying to use social media to expand the scope of their supporters:
The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up–to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other.
The idea here is that they have a certain number of people who are willing to pay for a traditional membership and a certain number of people who use their free services, but they want to create a middle tier that’s based on exclusive content. In this case, the exclusive content is partially being distributed via social media: a private Facebook group, private Twitter feed, etc. They chose a price point of $20 and launched from there.
This program shows how hard it is to draw an audience to exclusive content. It launched in Dec. 2008 and was targeted at 10,000 people who participate in the museum’s free First Saturday events. As of February, when the linked article was written, the paid program had 272 members. I’m not sure what the total number is now, but since the exclusive 1stfans Twitter account only has 218 followers as of this morning, it seems like it’s remained a very small percentage of the total audience the museum was targeting. It seems to be a reminder that having an online audience by no means implies that you have a monetizable audience.
via Museum 2.0: 1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum.
EDIT: Will (from the linked interview) responds to this post in the comments with some interesting thoughts and points out a bad assumption on my part, you should take a look at those for a closer perspective on this.
Digestion: Users Love Stupid Content
Sep 17th
Image by Kevin Marks
Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers: Shaquille O’Neal, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest. Sure, some serious people, like George Stephanopoulos and Al Gore, use Twitter. And a lot of publishing companies and bloggers (myself included) use Twitter to send links to articles we’ve published. But most of what streams across Twitter is junk. One recent study concluded that 40 percent of the messages are “pointless babble.”
Really? 40% of Twitter messages are “pointless babble”? Maybe it’s just me, but compared to television, radio, blogs, and, well, everyday conversations, that’s an amazingly good signal-to-noise ratio.
While Daniel Lyons catches up with those of us who have seen Idiocracy, a couple of other thoughts:
- $55 million in venture capital I can see. But is somebody going to pay $1 billion to acquire Twitter, the company that has trumpeted how unconcerned it is with making money?
- Twitter has an audience…but what kind of audience is it? Twitter users have become accustomed to filtering their messages precisely because of the spam, inane comments, and misdirected personal replies that fill the network. How responsive are Twitter users going to be compared to users of traditional web sites?
- The introduction of AdSense to gmail was one of the key moments in turning Google from the “don’t be evil” company into a burgeoning Big Brother. It was seen as significant for two reasons: the ads were being placed in the context of personal communications, and Google was scanning email for keywords to target ad placements. Twitter would be vulnerable to the first claim, but what about the second? It seems like contextual placement would be the best/only way to effectively advertise on Twitter, but with that be subject to as big a backlash as gmail saw?
- Twitter’s service is already pretty bad, quite frankly. Constant server outages, flaky search, and no real support system adds up to a service that probably would have been abandoned were it not free. Are users going to put up with bad service when they have to see ads as well? Are advertisers going to pay to place ads on a network that always seems to be a stiff breeze away from collapse?
Creeping Inevitability: Using Twitter Hashtags, Just Like Usenet!
Sep 16th
Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies.
via HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business.
Not a whole lot to say on the content of the article itself as its pretty basic and self explanatory. What I find interesting, though, is the hashtag idea itself. It breaks the idea of a social network because you’re no longer just broadcasting to your friends, you’re attaching a global tag that can be found anywhere. I wonder what would happen if Usenet were introduced as a new product today? That’s essentially what we’re looking at with tags, except for the character limits.
The fun part about Usenet was that it created community by starting with the tags (group names, as topics, are essentially just tags). Twitter, though, starts with a loose community and has now emergently added tags to it. What do the network maps look like for both services? It seems to me that Usenet was actually a more ‘social’ service in the sense that new communities were formed…users used to be more atomic, whereas now they’re more locked in to their individual, pre-determined circles. Not that Usenet was a utopia of course, even the groups that weren’t overrun by spam, porn, and binaries eventually developed into impenetrable tribal cliques…but that seems to be largely how Twitter is starting out.
