Microblogging / Unified Messaging

Twitter has released the ability to make lists of people, ie group 'em in convenient monotypes:

We’re putting the finishing touches on our new Lists feature and we're really excited about the folks who have already taken a lot of time creating awesome lists. From the @time list of funny people to your own list of people who make you laugh—it's easy to see how this feature increases discovery and adds value in lots of ways.

Lists also make it easier to curate tweets into meaningful real-time experiences on your own sites via the Lists API. Media companies are already taking advantage: for example, check out @huffingtonpost's use of the Lists API in their World Series coverage.

@Bettydraper/rolodex: A collection of fan-created Mad Men characters
@NYTimes/staff: The colorful people behind The Gray Lady
@BBC/radio1-1xtra: Turns out BBC radio hosts are a chatty bunch
@Joesebok/poker: A list of professional poker players by a professional poker player
@jayrosen/mindcasters: A list of the some of the best new media thinkers by an NYU professor
@Stocktwits/suggested: A list of traders for stock market fanatics

We’ve been taking our time rolling out the lists feature to make sure things go smoothly and developers have a chance to begin experimenting with our Lists API. For example, TLISTS will provide tools to efficiently build, measure and distribute Lists, while Listorious hosts a directory of 'awesome lists' on Twitter.

The really, really interesting thing is that you can have Public lists. Anyone can curate and publish these lists, and put anyone else on it. So if you have an idea for one, just click "New list" in the sidebar of your Twitter account and you're on your way. However. the above options don't go far enough - I see the opportunity not just for extending one's egosystem, but for more radical waggish fun and mayhem - so the suggestions below probably go too far :

@Hotornot/Twittergals - the jolly grouping of all those Ladies (or men, we ain't sexist here) and the opportunity to decide who are not a perfect "10"
@Bastardswhof*ckedmeover - just as it says on the tin. Build your own antisocial network, hours of entertainment for the whole extended digifamily
@Jerkswhotalkaboutlunch - for people who like talking about what they had for lunch on Twitter.
@CoffeeteableTwitterList - Your List of People you Should Be Following so other people think you are UberCool
@PeopleI'msuckingupto - Would be even better if you could auto-retweet them all
@Peoplewhoowememoney - put your debtor list online (hat tip Steve Lawson)
@Iwouldn'tfollowthesewankersifmylifedependedonit - "unlists" (hat tip JP Rangaswami)

Blimey, that was quick.......

Now, apparently you can exeunt yourself from being on these sorts of lists by blocking them yourself, but that seems time consuming for the poor listee, so no doubt some more sophisticated controls will have to emerge.

Ah - I see the List Facility is also on my account.......... I may be gone some time, I have some listbots to write

Yup, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has joined Twitter., moniker timberners_lee. There must be some form of recursivity there somewhere

Apparently he finds the interface confusing - no doubt next he will start tinkering, and who knows where that might lead.....look what happened last time

(Update - a friend tells me he is not actually microblogging on Twitter per se. He has linked his indenti.ca account to Twitter and uses identi.ca to microblog..... no wonder he finds the interface confusing :-0 )

Last night, amidst massive protests, the leader of the British National Party*, Nick Griffin was allowed onto one of the BBC's premier political programmes, Question Time. This is a debate style program, typically 5 people - 3 politicians of the main parties, 2 people from other walks of life (or minor parties) and is very high risk for politicians as the audience can ask some difficult questions and their sharp comments can undo the best prepared polemic.

But to me the really interesting thing about Question Time (and other TV programs) is that the British Twitterati have got into the habit of chatting and commenting on the programme using the hashtag #bbcqt, and that to me is the really interesting bit, for 2 reasons:

- The dream of people interacting around TV programming via social networks, a key plank of Joost's original pitch, has been shown to be valid - its just that people are using a microblogging service on standard terrestrial TV rather than herding sheeplike into the Web TV players' own social networks

- Why Twitter - I hypothesize that its because:

(i) Its a mass-chat based system and easy to apply in this sort of live-comment usage

(ii) Assymetric follow - I can see the opinions of people I don't usually follow - adds richness

(iii) 140 Characters - what killed debate in the earlier email based UseNet were people writing massive polemic essays and swamping the textwaves. 140 characters means a light touch of easily digestible views

There is also fascinating implication here - the same internetworks that are breaking up the media are also capable of re-combining audiences in the social media systems. I can't imagine how you would use Facebook to do this (too cumbersome) or IM (too small an audience reach).

Update - two good points/clarifications:

- Richard Beddard notes in the comments below that on of the issues now facing something like #bbcqt is the sheer volume (it was hitting 1,000 twts a minute at one stage) these hashtag based comment aggregators can get, and the need for better filtering

- Matt Locke noted (on Twitter) that the #bbcqt did not unify all opinion, and interestingly the opinion on the BBC "Have Your say" website was very different in flavour. The thought I was airing above is that Twitter was more an aggregator of many off-the-BBC-site comment subnetworks that would otherwise not have been seen in one place.

Incidentally, in my personal view the audience collectively came out as the most sensible attendee in the Question Time debate - which is fascinating in itself too. The other panel members (Liberal Democrat excepted more of the time) succumbed to the temptation of pillorying Griffin, whereas - in my view anyway - if they had STFU he would have hanged himself on his own petard, without getting any sympathy. Trust in Free Speech .....

(*For the uninitiated, the BNP is a classic "far right" party - their policies are almost designed to make the liberal left splutter into their FairTrade lattes. The fascinating problem is that the BNP now have similar sort of elected political support in the UK to the Greens, Welsh Nationalists etc (primarily due to the Government totally botching up massive immigration over the last 10 years) and thus - in a free speech country - deserve access to these national TV platforms. This has led to the fascinating spectacle of the liberal/left leaning politicos all dying to deny free speech, rather than support it as one would expect...... )

Its very fashionable among the digital chatterati to knock email (it is in fact a prerequisite for social media experts to recite the "email bad, socmed good" mantra daily), and the Email vs Noo Meedja debate is a hardy perennial in the blogosphere - today's shot comes from Jessica Vascellaro at the WSJ

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Email, you see, is so boringly slow:

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we'd complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

Or will we? What has happened is the transaction cost of the message has continually moved from sender (hey, it costs nothing to send so I'll fire away) to the receiver, who now has to deal with the huge increase in data thrown at him or her. To understand the likely evolution, it is helpful to look at some elements of information theory. There are three main principles of Information Theory that are relevant in my view:


Shannon's Law

Shannon's Law states in essence that the channel capacity is bound by the bandwidth of the channel and the signal to noise ratio. In other words, there is a limit to the information that can be processed. In this case, the bandwidth at issue is the bandwidth of the receiver (you) to process what is coming in. There are two elements to this:

- The bigger the firehose, the bigger the receiver's ability to process must be
- The worse the Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio, the more cr*p has to be processed in the firehose to get what is needed.


Signal to Noise Ratio

The S/N ratio is the % of a communication that is useful vs that which is "noise". At some point, as the signal to noise ratio decreases, the utility of the system decreases below a point where it is useful to continue with it. Email suffers badly from this at present, because:

- Low transaction costs increase the number of messages sent
- As the cost of sending information reduces, so the information value of each piece does not have to be as high - so you get a lot of near zero value information.

As you can see, this is not a problem that the new mediums solve - they have, in many cases, even lower transaction costs so the likelihood over time is a poorer, not better S/N ratio. The reason they are not as plagued as email yet is that they just do not have the volumes, because:

Network Effects

In theory, as more people are connected in a network, utility rises. The downside is each extra transaction has a processing cost, and at some point the costs are greater than the utility, which is why the "real" network effect is an S curve, not a hockey stick. This is where email is today, with many hundreds of millions of people connected and the utility declining as people's inboxes continually fill up. There is nothing in the intrinsic design of the latest systems that make them more proof against this effect than email - in fact, as we saw above, it could get worse as each new user is more "noisy" on average than on email due to even lower message transaction costs. Those of us who were around on the textnet in the days of yore will recall how delightful email was when there were so few people on it, and when it wasn't worth spammers getting bundles of addresses and blasting people on it - and will also be watching the spam developments on Twitter with a weary eye. Likewise, the increasing use of "pull" techniques in social media mirrors similar in email groupware. I expect to see Daily Twitter digests ere long......

In other words, these newer mediums' main saving grace currently is simply that there are less people on them. I contend that as their user base increases, the receiver side will have to become more and more sophisticated - so Tweetdeck et al will start to look more and more like an email client in functionality.

As to how people will use them over time, all things being equal, in my view the issue for email vs newer "always on" systems with limited persistence is the tradeoff in personal productivity verses group productivity:

- to shift attention from one task to another, to change mental gears, takes time. What email had in its favour over telephony was that it was asynchronous - ie you got stuff done without interruption, then processed emails in "burst". For certain types of knowledge work this is very useful as it minimises wasted cycles of high value knowledge workers.

- on the other hand, for some activities having the whole group clued in as quickly as possible is the most productive option, as it minimise wasted cycles of a whole group of people by ensuring co-ordination.

In various circumstances one type is more useful than the other, and in my view we will see co-existence of various systems. Incidentally, would observe today that (i) the bulk of users of the social media tools to date tend to have a lower value per unit time than the users of email - they are very typically consumers on their own time - and in corollary (ii) many users of social tools who do have high time value either use it in a "bursty" mode like email or use it more as a broadcast tool.

Jessica ends up with similar observations in fact:

Will the new services save time, or eat up even more of it?

Many of the companies pitching the services insist they will free up people.

Jeff Teper, vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint division, which makes software that businesses use to collaborate, says in the past, employees received an email every time the status changed on a project they were working on, which led to hundreds of unnecessary emails a day. Now, thanks to SharePoint and other software that allows companies to direct those updates to flow through centralized sites that employees can check when they need to, those unnecessary emails are out of users' in-boxes.
"People were very dependent on email. They overused it," he says. "Now, people can use the right tool for the right task."

Perhaps. But there's another way to think about all this. You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

To me this paragraph shows where the real race is between these various systems - in filtering. Right now, social media is mainly filtered via the simple expedient of there being fewer people on it. If it reached email volumes, as it has to to do all the roles email does, then the maximum utility will go to the service with the best filters.

By the way, read the comments - fascinating!

Today, amongst massive blog attention, Twitter announces "Lists":

The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.

Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you've created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

Good heavens - does this just look a bit like the emergence of email Groupware in the early 90's?. Of course not, because email, as we all know, is evil. Perish that thought!

But the functionality we need for using messaging is roughly the same, irrespective of system.

Thus - another prediction for you - in 2 years time you won't be able to tell the difference between a Twitter client and an email one functionally. We will all have ThunderTweet and Microsoft Tweetlook on our systems by then (or more likely Thunderbird et al will handle Twts and emails). Or we will all have Google Wave I suppose...... (who will win the Next Gen Comm Client War - answers on a Twtcard)

And everyone will be moaning about the "Tyranny of their Tweetbox"

And there will be a new, fun, system that all the cool people are using, and it will be cool mainly because its got so few people on it so it doesn't swamp you, and its not where all the work tasks come from......

FT article about funders lining up to fund Twitter based startups:

Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate any revenue, early-stage investors are pouring millions of pounds into small companies in the Twitter “ecosystem” in the London area.

London has produced the most popular of the many third-party tools used to post to Twitter, called Tweetdeck. Reading’s Tweetmeme, which tracks the most popular news stories discussed on Twitter, is attracting millions of visitors a month while Twitterfeed, based in Tooting, is used by thousands of publishers to post their latest headlines on to the site.

“In the UK we’ve got a real phenomenon going on,” says John Borthwick, the British-born chief executive of Betaworks, a New York company that has invested in Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and Twitter itself. Just as Scandinavia took an early lead in mobile technology, “the UK has become fast-forward in terms of social”, thanks to high broadband penetration.

In fact, reading some of the more breathless commentary doing the rounds one can see the unmistakeable signs of Bubblepsych, albeit a microblogging Microbubble. The underpinning logic is very sound, in our view:

Saul Klein of TAG and Index Ventures, which also backed Skype, sees Twitter as part of a more fundamental shift in the internet to being a “live experience” rather than serving static web-pages.

“The web has gone through three major phases,” he says. “The first was publishing. The second was more personalised and social. What we are seeing now is the growth of real-time services, such as status updates and micro-blogging. The way you find value from that is fundamentally different to anything we’ve seen before.”

We'd agree that the Web is moving to a realtime Web, and in fact will evolve from there (we believe that real time will by necessity demand a filtered, predictive web). But to put one's eggs in the Twitter basket is a big risk, as you are essentially handing power over to a proprietary environment owned by a 3rd party that itself does not yet have a route to making profits - in fact in our view its most likely route to profit is a charge on those same services using its ecosystem. There is also, in our view, very little barrier to entry for newcomers so it will be hard to ensure a competitive advantage.

Wordpress adopting widepread RSSCloud, Google adopting PubSubHubbub, and the relative ease of building a Twitter API system via open source components implies to us that the "real time" ecosystem landscape is going to get much more competitive, and quite fast, so good luck to Twitter and all who sail on her - I think they will need it. And just in case, as the FT notes:

....even though their names betray their origins, many of these businesses are expanding to include other social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook – just in case Twitter turns out to be a fad after all.

Very sensible - build a brand and early user base on Twitter but be ready to move across other ecosystems. Or even better, plan to be across all from teh start - the risk is other platforms will build on these other ecosystems too. From a funding point of view, a flutter on Twitter is a great idea - but betting the nest egg probably isn't!

From Brand Republic, reporting on a study by Peer Analytics

Tweets were studied for two weeks and categorized into six areas: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

More than 40% of tweets were found to be pointless babble, followed closely by conversational tweets at 37%.

Pass-along value, or re-tweets, accounted for 8.7% of the total, a distant third.

Self-promotion tweets, typical corporate tweets about products, services, or "Twitter only" promos were fourth on the list at 5.85%. Spam and news, rounded out the bottom at about 3% each.

So, news at 3%, and lets assume "the rest excluding spam and babble" - about 57% - has about 1/6th relevance (a figure derived by a quick count on Tweetdeck) gives about a 10% signal, the rest is pretty much noise. A lot if it is diverting noise of course, and herein lies the problem - poor filtering!

But given that many people seem to still lap it up, and I'd bet Facebook is far worse (seen this - buying virtual goods with slebs on them on Facebook?), is Social Media the new Opiate of the Masses?

Update - some feel that more of the stuff that I didn't count as relevant to me is useful in a sort of river of "small-cap news" way - I had another look and thought OK, I can see another c 10% that may be relevant to me (in the light of general background stuff not aimed at me) , for a S/N ratio of 20% - thoughts?

Update II - excellent set of discussions over Twitter and at Tuttle on Friday on this, 3 big takeaways:

- Some of the "noise" is social grooming and "stamp giving" (to quote the social transactional analysts) - but where to draw the line on "relevance"?
- We need "hard" metrics like these in order to build useful filtering systems, especially those that are in some way predictive and automateable
- There is an ideological battle at points like this between "hard" and "soft" social network scientists - I come down on the "hard" science side given my background, it is incomprehensible to me that people would not want to quantify these phenomena, bit it is clearly incomprehensible to others that one would want to

So, here is an argument that a lot of the claimed "its not noise" is actually voyeuristic stuff that we don't want to turn off now we can see it, and here is an argument that it is relevant.

Update III - story seems to have hit Twitter today (Monday) after some harrumphing blogs - and resultant twts - about how the "MSM" don't "get" Twitter. I see it more as evidence of resistance to the concept of "hard" metrics from mainly "soft" SocNet types.

UpdateIV - quite a nice corollary argument using a Shannon's Law type argument from Devin Coldeway over on TechCrunch:

What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves.

(Shannon's Law is another cornerstone of Information Theory, and essentially looks at how bandwidth limits the amount of information one can transmit vs noise)

Came back to the Netz this evening after a day spent mainly in Real Life World (a strange place, full of physical objects that engage all 5 senses) to find the Twitterverse abuzz about the shock they had had , as Twitter was like Down, like All Day! OmiGod!.

Imagine the pent up witterings that has been held up, all those lunches left uneaten in forests of Twitter silence. Those pearls of wisdom from Ashton Kutcher and other net-slebs had been cast before those swines of routers.

Clearly I had avoided a fate worse than death by missing all the inaction....

Anyway, all is well with the world tonight, as the Denial of Service attacks are now largely over apparently.

(OK, OK - a Denial of Service attack on Twitter is interesting in itself*, but a Day without Twitter is not the Day The Earth Stood Still)

Speaking of Denial and this Real World thing, I also read that some coffee shops are starting to think about Denial of Service to laptop users who will hog a (revenue producing) table for ours on one measly cup of coffee. I do know of one place that has wifi use on a timer, maybe we will see more of that coming?

*See Pete and Adriana's comments below.....relying on these sort of architectures for critical path infrastructure is clearly becoming a risk for users, and for developers

There has been quite a bit of hype about Twitter of late, if you hadn't noticed. However, what tends to get lost in all this is that it works so well in spite of the vapids , PR Ho's and the slebs who spam it. As Jonathan Zittrain noted this week that:

It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

Its useful to just list what these qualities are. It has a rather unique architecture, something between a chatroom and social net, with a lot of hard edged Unified Messaging too. Here's a starter for Ten

1. Publish/Subscribe push system - efficient, as no need to request stuff. Scalable as it lends itself to everything from broadcast to one on one comms

2. Asynchronous - you do not have to be online to get the messages (same as email)

3. Asymmetric- you don't need permission to follow someone to get their messages - makes it very flexible, and very quick to set up to listen to many sources.

4. (Near) Real Time - news moves as soon as it is input - makes the system very responsive. Twitter search massively outperforms Google for "new" news for example

5. Unified Communications - can take messages in and pass them out in multiple formats - text, email, web, mobile, computer.

6. Simplicity - 140 character simple messaging format makes Unified Comm easier to do in multiple networks

7. Low Transaction Cost - This short message also makes messaging easy for users as very low transacation costs both to write and read, and promotes heavy usage

8. Multi-Media - carries text, photos (twitpic), voice, video (clips), links

9. Open Applications Interface - leads to huge creative effort leading to rapidly building functionality on top of the transport architecture - and outsourcing this to "the community" makes it very fast to evolve. Also, develops organically with customer demand so stuff is immediately useful

10. Increasingly forcing other systems eg Facebook to mirror them, and then sucks in those messages as well

One of the interesting thing is to watch the evolution of social nets, as one generation builds on the lessons of the previous one. Twitter launched with quite a few competitors, but it got that mix of features more "right" than the others. It was the most boned down and simple to use initially and that allowed it to win out. There must be a Zen thing about that, surely?

Be interesting to see what builds on top of Twitter.

(Update - interesting article on Twitter in Iran etc with another 6 points orhogonal to these above)

Two events sent the Twitterverse abuzz this week.

Firstly, the sublime. Twitter, owing to is unique architecture - Unified Comms across multiple device types and networks, and an asymmetric, asynchronous, dispersed pub/sub system - was key to getting news in and out of Iran and (to a lesser extent) allowing opposition to the Iranschluss to combine and collaborate. It was seen to be so key that the US government asked them to delay system maintenance downtime till Iranian midnight.

Secondly, the opposite extreme - $1,000 a head for a 2 day conference on Twitter in NYC (or equity in your startup up to $500 if you were too poor to pay). The twitterstream (#140conf) has the occasional sparkling nugget in a sewer of sludge, not a river of data. I'm sure it was a fine conference, but thems big bucks for such a small thing....do I hear the words "hype curve"? (Contrast that with the 1/2 day UK one which was a small contribution to charity).

It has already been roundly lampooned by the Great White Snarks of the chatterati, Loren Feldman and Paul Carr, so 'nuff said. ( Careful boys - the Hudson is close and concrete boots are cheap.... ) .

Actually I have to pass on Loren Feldman's sage advice on the Secret of Success in Twitter:

Just post links to your shit, the occasional fake motivational bullshit, and then post more links to your shit. The end.

That'll be $1,000 please

Still, as Jonathan Zittrain noted, It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

And as an added bonus you can shade your avatar green to show your solidarity with the Iranians as theirs turn red with their blood. (Quick quiz - how many of you know that green was the colour of the Fatimid Caliphate, and what it stands for....)

More worrying though is that one session in the latter event has an impact on the former. The Israeli's were originally out-twitted in the recent Gaza conflict but rapidly came up with countermeasures, as the Jerusalem Post explains:

For their part, the Israelis began using Twitter in the early days of the conflict in Gaza, when Saranga logged onto Twitter and found, he said, "incorrect information" from anonymous sources. "The official voice of Israel and the voice of the Israelis should be put out there so people will get the entire picture," he said. Today, the Israeli Consulate has more than 6,400 followers on Twitter.

The Iranians were taken by surprise, but tinpot despots around the world have taken notice, next time there will be far more Twitter Counter Measures in place, and its is not the be all and end all, as the article refernced above notes:

"I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect," says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. "The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size."