My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 022610

February 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

From the home office at a table in front a congressional hearing where I’m explaining why I didn’t actually put any brakes in my cars…

#1: All your authentication are belong to us http://bit.ly/d2S177 by Forrester’s @TomGrantForr > Facebook Connect is pulling away

#2: RT @defrag wow. twitter moving to Cassandra (#NoSQL) – http://bit.ly/9z8nvp – so, FB, Digg, Twitter all on NoSQL. oracle, are you listening?

#3: Interesting: Why the iPad can’t use flash http://bit.ly/bG6X9K > How do you “mouseover” with your finger?

#4: RT @BBHLabs Bored of reading that @foursquare is the ‘new Twitter’; it’s a different kind of utility altogether – http://j.mp/9s8GDD

#5: Study – Distributed Idea Generation Outperforms Team Brainstorming (Spigit blog) http://bit.ly/dffHzL #innovation #crowdsourcing

#6: Crowdsourcing Collaboration in Education http://bit.ly/aPmSj0 by @eduinnovation > Educators can tap large networks #innovation

#7: How to Fail at Innovation http://is.gd/98YUh by @timkastelle > “The way to fail at #innovation is to try to avoid failing”

#8: The Side Effects of Open Innovation http://bit.ly/9hIaQI by @lindegaard “it’s very much about managing change” #innovation #e20

#9: 10 tips for Successful Crowdsourcing http://post.ly/OxhU

#10: RT @exUnited Southwest Airlines selects Spigit for innovation mgmt http://bit.ly/blTGO3 Innovation is like LUV – deliberate, not accidental

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 070309

July 4, 2009 by 1 Comment

From the home office in Wasilla, Alaska…

#1: This tweet about some guy that didn’t get picked for some winery’s social media job is getting a lot of Digg interest: http://bit.ly/1vhvWM

#2: “#1 factor preventing full adoption of social media is the lack of executive trust in employees” http://bit.ly/2FbMQY by @CarolineDangson

#3: New Spigit blog post: Is Enterprise 2.0 Just for Knowledge Workers? http://bit.ly/3pwQVF #e20

#4: Reading: Are You Encouraging Innovation? http://bit.ly/Hh5U5 by EMC’s @LenDevanna #innovation

#5: “Generating great ideas to the wrong challenge is worse than mediocre ideas for the right challenge”. Arthur VanGundy #innovation

#6: Understand the job your product was hired to do, says Clay Christensen. Good example by OfficeMax: http://bit.ly/ff4c6 #innovation

#7: Nice post about harnessing community brainpower to solve problems, and Spigit http://bit.ly/12etu5 by Sun Micro’s @drapeau

#8: Bing is starting to serve up the latest tweets for people when you search their name + “twitter”. Nicely done. http://bit.ly/Qmym3

#9: RT @gialyons Famous speeches delivered via Twitter: http://bit.ly/10rY2c

#10: Funny discussion by @peterkim and @markstevens20 about the need to give your kids unique names in a social media world http://bit.ly/Ua3Lz

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 012309

January 25, 2009 by Leave a comment

From the home office in Phoenix, AZ…

#1: @amcafee My fave #inaug09 moment: the way Obama handled the muffed oath admin. On-the-spot composure, ability to handle pressure. #andyasks

#2: IBM’s term for layoffs is “resource action”. That’s a new one.

#3: Example of Yammer benefit. I just yammed about wanting to see a feature algorithm, not sure who wrote it. Engineer replied to me w/ answer.

#4: One thing about Enterprise 2.0 ROI: the highest return has the least predictability

#5: My first blog post that’s ever gotten any traction on Digg, “Angels and Demons of Our Social Media Souls” http://bit.ly/T3sd

#6: Brothers & Sisters TV show quote: “I didn’t know what Twitter was” (OK, don’t hate because that show is on TV here right now)

#7: If you’re looking for free, high quality icons for that presentation, check out iconspedia: http://bit.ly/QxirL

#8: Hard to tell when a fax goes through successfully here. Our fax machine is very secretive about its activity reports.

#9: Played a round of War with my 4 y.o. using home-made cards. True to statistical probabilities, we went 2-2-1 in our five games.

#10: Wonder what George Bush is doing tonight?

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Angels and Demons of Our Social Media Souls

January 21, 2009 by 13 Comments

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

angels-and-demons-of-our-social-media-soulsAngel image: The Angel Whisperer

Devil image: People are the boss

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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Angels+and+Demons+of+Our+Social+Media+Souls%22&who=everyone

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Weekly Recap 071108: iPhone’s Big Gulp of Humility

July 11, 2008 by 4 Comments

Today was Apple’s big day, the release of its new 3G iPhone…geeks lined up days beforehand…stores were full of new iPhones…money was burning holes in pockets…the doors opened…customers rushed in to be the first ones to have the shiny new gadget…they claim their iPhones and go to activate in-store, an Apple requirement…and…the activation FAILS…

Damn, that sucked…

Apple is a company that has been on a hot streak for a while…here’s a quote about them from a recent Fortune article:

Apple requires a special kind of workforce. The place is divided by product but also by function along what COO Tim Cook calls “very faint lines.” Collaboration is key. So is a degree of perfectionism. Apple hires people who are never satisfied.

Today’s activation flub has got to be eating them up sumthin’ fierce…Apple has worked hard to achieve and maintain its air of excellence and coolness…

Fake Steve Jobs recently retired from his blogging…but surely this is too delicious to not write one more post…

All that said, Robert Scoble gives the new iPhone a thumbs up…

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Loren Feldman is currently following only 3 people on his Twitter account…he unsubscribed from everyone he was following…wow…he does say that he will be on FriendFeed going forward…

I’m not comfortable damning this guy, as I’ve never heard of him outside of recent events…he seems pretty tightly wound and people describe him as funny…he messed up with TechNigga…I’m willing to watch what he does going forward…and was this really Wayne Sutton commenting on Loren’s blog?

Thanks for the official statement, continue to create videos and I hope everyone from this situation has learned something and does not stop the future of sponsorship from other national outlets with the online video blogging community. I’m looking forward to your next project.

If that’s Wayne, wow…

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I’ve never said meatspace….

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Lots of discussions this week about the fast growth of subscribers for big name people on FriendFeed…Allen Stern does a nice job of breaking it down in this video…the issue is that same people tend to show up in two key places on FriendFeed…(1) the first 12 subscriptions listed on users’ Me page…and (2) the same 9 people are often displayed on the recommended page…shaking things up on those listings would be nice…

For my part, I was really surprised at the number of subscriptions (~100) that occurred because of Mike Fruchter’s post about ten people to follow on FriendFeed…thanks for the shout-out Mike…

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Two young women keeping it real out there on FriendFeed…Mona N and Michelle Miller…

Mona is a geeky gal who also attracts attention from the fellas…Hao Chen declared:

Ahh…Mona just overtook Robert Scoble as my #1 person you find interesting.

Michelle is irreverent, keeping folks entertained with updates about her dates with The UPS Guy…her blog post describing their first date was What Brown Did for Me…

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On Twitter, there are two ways to broadcast a blog post:

  1. Tweet a link to your own blog post, usually including something like “blog post” so people have a heads up its your own post.
  2. Tweet the word “reading” and the name of the blog post with a URL. This lets people know that you’re reading someone else’s blog post, and you like it enough to tell others about it.

Jason Calacanis tweets “reading” for his own blog posts. Huh? Reading? He wrote it! Here’s one example:

Reading: “Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging.” (http://tinyurl.com/5zae7s)

Don’t hate the playa, hate the game, I guess…

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Digg founder Kevin Rose provided a great example of changing the name of blog post during its submission to Digg…

Here’s Allen Stern’s post, referenced earlier, about the ways in which A-listers quickly accumulate followers:

  • “FriendFeed Follower Patterns Exposed: How Jason, Mike, Loic & Robert Get So Many Followers So Quickly (video)”

Here’s how Kevin Rose submitted Allen’s post to Digg:

  • “The politics of Friend Feed”

Call it social media attention optimization….

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See this post on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+071108%3A+iPhone%E2%80%99s+Big+Gulp+of+Humility%22&public=1

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Why FriendFeed is Disruptive: There’s Only 24 Hours in a Day

May 26, 2008 by 14 Comments

Forget fractured conversations. How about fractured attention?

MG Siegler has a post up at ParisLemon titled FriendFeed Should Kill Those Who Accuse It of Murder. In the post, he writes that the current meme about FriendFeed killing Twitter and Google Reader is overblown and that all the services will exist in relative harmony for the foreseeable future.

To which I ask: did someone just extend the day to 25 hours?

Because there really is a zero sum game aspect to social media. We only have 24 hours in a day, and we have to decide where to spend those hours.

That daily time limit is what makes FriendFeed so disruptive.

Allocation of the 24 Hour Day

The chart below is a hypothetical day of a relatively advanced social media user (no laughs about Facebook please):

The chart shows our social media user at three different points. I’ve taken the liberty of assuming that certain core life stuff is maintained consistently: sleep, eat, work, family. All else is flex time.

So with the core life stuff constant at 19.5 hours, and more time spent on FriendFeed, something’s got to give? But what?

Not websites and blogs. In fact, their page views go up because of FriendFeed. Their content is the currency of FriendFeed conversations.

I think the two services that get hit the hardest as FriendFeed grows will be:

  • Twitter
  • Crowdsourced aggregators: Digg, Stumbleupon, LinkRiver, Reddit

Twitter

I left this comment on Corvida’s post The #1 Reason FriendFeed Will Not “Dethrone” Twitter at SheGeeks.net:

My two cents. FriendFeed direct posts feel like Twitters, only you can see the whole conversation, not just part of it. FriendFeed lacks the @reply and DM, so if those are important use cases, yeah it’s not replacing Twitter. But for putting something out there and having your subscribers weigh in…well, it feels like Twitter.

I’m not the only one. Two heavyweights in the blogging world have expressed their feelings about using FriendFeed in lieu of Twitter:

  • Steve Rubel :”Who’s spending less time on Twitter and more time here? I am.”
  • Duncan Riley: “@geechee_girl true, and if I can switch to FF with everyone on Twitter, I’d start considering swapping most if not all of the time”

The key to Twitter’s success is not it’s haiku format, it’s the community, as Duncan Riley mentions. Twitter is growing fantastically, as more people adopt it (and unfortunately stress its current platform). That community is what makes it vibrant special. FriendFeed appears to be rapidly growing its own community. I’ll be curious what the Compete.com May numbers look like for FriendFeed.

Note in the allocation of the day, I don’t eliminate Twitter. People have built up their networks there, and tweeting has become a habit. Also, the @reply function is quite popular, as is the DM. One might ask if those functions aren’t essentially covered by instant messaging and email, but Twitter fans love ’em.

But I see the direct post + comments as taking interaction away from Twitter.

Crowdsourced Aggregators

The basic function of these applications is to surface the content receiving the most votes. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and LinkRiver are great for discovering content that others have found valuable. Digg includes robust, active commenting.

Well, doesn’t that sound like FriendFeed? The system of ‘Likes’ and comments ensures that community-ranked content appears at the top of your FriendFeed page.

Again, FriendFeed doesn’t kill these services. StumbleUpon, for example, has a persistence to it that FriendFeed lacks. Content gets its moment in the sun on FriendFeed, then gets buried in pages further back. I’ve noticed the StumbleUpon activity around content can last for days, weeks.

But over time, as users discover ranked content on FriendFeed, I’d expect them to cut back their time on the other crowdsourced aggregators. Not stop using these other services, but check in on them less frequently.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps as MG Siegler said, there really is room for all of these social media apps. Folks will just expand the amount of time they devote to them. But I question that assumption. Your employer still pays you for your hours. Your kids still want your time. The human body needs its sleep. And you still need to eat.

FriendFeed is disruptive because it challenges a number of other applications. If you find something that offers an outstanding experience and provides a good percentage of what you like in other social media apps, wouldn’t you spend more time there?

I mean, there’s only but so many hours in a day.

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See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=who%3Aeveryone++%22Why+FriendFeed+is+Disruptive%3A+There%E2%80%99s+Only+24+Hours+in+a+Day%22

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Ten FriendFeed Visitors Beats 1,000 StumbleUpons Any Day

May 5, 2008 by 32 Comments

The average StumbleUpon visitors stay a few seconds on the site and then leave having visited one page. That’s exactly how I use the StumbleUpon toolbar, clicking the Stumble! button quickly unless a site particularly grabs my interest immediately.

Traffic Growth #5 – What Value In StumbleUpon Visitors?
Fog of Eternity – Robin Cannon

Robin’s observation probably rings true for most bloggers. Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg can drive significant traffic to a site. If ad impressions or clicks are important to a blog, then those visitors might have value. If your goal is to build an audience with whom you mutually learn and build relationships, those sites aren’t worth much.

Traffic from StumbleUpon and Digg is like loading up on empty calories. They fill you up for a while, but they have no nutritional value and leave you hungry for more soon thereafter.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, lets bloggers build a solid foundation of long-term readers who in turn serve as the best sources of new readers.

FriendFeed Difference: Trusted Referrals

What makes FriendFeed such a great platform for building your blog readership? Two big reasons:

  • Trusted referrals
  • Blogger participation

FriendFeed enables trusted referrals at two levels of a blogger’s social networks. The first level are those people who subsribe to the blogger’s feed. They’ll be the first to see new content. These members may then comment, share or bookmark the new blog post.

The second level is more distant from the blogger. This is the “friend of friends” feature, as shown below:

With this FriendFeed feature, your blog is reaching people who do not subscribe to you. In the example above, I’m seeing Rex Hammock’s blog post because he’s a friend of Robert Scoble. A crucial thing to notice though…I only see Rex’s blog post because our mutual friend Robert ‘liked’ the post. His action is the key that makes this feature pop up. In other words, you’re not just bludgeoned with a huge flow of unfiltered feeds in the friend-of-friend feature.

I personally have used the friend-of-friend many times to follow new people I didn’t know. I have moved from being a second-degree member of the bloggers’ social network to a first degree member (i.e. a subscriber). This is a powerful feature of FriendFeed, both for bloggers to gain new readers and for members to discover new content.

The pictures below show how the FriendFeed social graph works. The initial picture shows a blogger’s beginning social graph. Four people subscribe to his FriendFeed updates. But those four have their own connections, enabling their networks to see the blog post. If they like it, then their friends will see it too. A viral process for blog exposure:

The outer bands of the blogger’s social graph get exposure to the blog. As the blog is viewed further away from the core, the viral distribution falls off. But some of the members in the outer bands will subscribe to the blogger’s FriendFeed, which increases his core social network:

The new subscribers become the source of additional readers through their social networks. A new blog post comes out, and their friends will see it, bringing new subscribers. And so it goes, on and on. With enough time, a blogger will have a terrific base of people that enjoy discussing similar topics.

StumbleUpon, Digg: Drive-By Readers

Contrast the slow-building, strong ties forged in FriendFeed to the fast, drive-by traffic coming from StumbleUpon and Digg. Sure, the traffic is great. But you likely won’t see those readers again. With StumbleUpon, many of those visitors are just clicking their ‘Stumble!’ button. With Digg, the blog serves as content for a community that exists entirely outside of the blogger’s social graph. So the blog post gets its moment in the sun with the Digg community, which then moves on to other content.

Final Thoughts

FriendFeed makes it easier for a blogger to build readership than did previous options. I also have a suspicion that exposure via FriendFeed makes it easier for smaller bloggers to make it onto Techmeme.

What do you think? Is FriendFeed becoming the true social graph of bloggers and their readers?

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See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=ten+friendfeed+visitors+beats+stumbleupons&public=1

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