Posts Tagged: twitter

Software / Thoughts — 5 Comments
6
Jun 08

Searching Twitter Better

Update: See Backtweets.com.

My experience watching the percolation of Freedom throughout the web was instructive – a chunk of viral traffic is moving from blogs to Twitter. If you’re not monitoring your blog/company/brand in Twitter, you probably should.

There are two major Twitter search services, Tweetscan and Summize. I’ve adopted Tweetscan – it is blazing fast and seems to have a larger corpus (i.e. more data) than Summize. Both offer RSS, so you can easily set up searches and stick them in your newsreader.

There is a major drawback to these services when it comes to searching for links. As URL shortening is very common in Twitter, and there are hundreds of URL shortening services, it is often impossible to search exhaustively for links to your domain. Unless you search for all shortened versions of your page (i.e. your link shortened by TinyUrl, Snurl, MooUrl, and so on..), you’re not going to find all of the conversation.

This problem is solvable. For a few minutes I though about building a bookmark that would compute shortened URL’s and search all of them in Tweetscan/Summize. However, this approach is horribly inefficient and I didn’t want to submit my el cheapo hosting service to the load if it went viral. Instead, the Twitter search services need to post-process URL’s they find and build an index of the canonical URL’s. This would allow me to search a URL and find all of the URL’s that eventually point to my domain, regardless of the link-shortened context.

The upside of a service building such an index would be I’d be able to find all links into my blog in one search, rather than individually searching each permalink. If Tweetscan has a post-processed index of all links pointing to permalinks inside of Unit Structures, I’d be able to find all of these links by searching on my domain.

In the meantime, has anyone run into viable stopgap solutions for this problem?

Research / Thoughts — 8 Comments
27
May 08

Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks

This past weekend, I was in Los Angeles to attend the wonderful HASTAC conference. Highlights included Howard Rheingold’s keynote, Curtis Wong’s discussion of the World Wide Telescope, and Bill Tomlinson’s demo on human-mediated networking. I was asked to join a panel entitled Trends in TechnoTravels/TeleMobility, so I thought I’d share what I spoke about here – a talk entitled Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks.


The talks on the panel were short, so rather than presenting research I mined Unit Structures to talk about some emergent themes I’m observing in social networks. Readers of my blog may recognize these themes: Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity. A lot my thinking is influenced by sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Muxtape and even ClaimID – sites where people are being social in smaller, more focused ways. Here’s the quick explanation, with links to reference posts with longer explanation:


Closeness: I see closeness in social network sites as a function of smaller friend networks and more personalized content. With more focused networks, the contextual challenges that lead to self-censorship are diminished. Compared to a site where one has hundreds of friends, including the boss, family members and friends, in a close site one knows their audience and engages them personally. Examples: Twitter, LiveJournal, Tumblr.

Curation: Curation emerges in sites built around social objects. Unlike Friendfeed, which is a decontextualized mess of everything a person creates, a curation-oriented site focuses on limited, curated content. Our identity wants to be faceted, and curation-oriented sites allow us to best present certain parts of our persona. Examples: Muxtape, Flickr, Vimeo.

Imagined Identity: Some sites are moving away from first-generation social network profile, one in which your identity is explicitly enumerated. Next-gen sites induce identity in more nuanced fashions. In Twitter, your bio is limited to 140 characters, meaning your “profile” or “identity” in more a function of your production. This is engaging, as the identity you produce naturally winds and changes as you “update” your profile by sending messages. Certainly more interesting that listing your favorite movies and changing them every six months. Examples: Twitter, Seesmic.

I was also asked to think about mobile social networks. I’ve been notoriously down on MoSoNet (or whatever it’s called) because so much of the technology requires freshening of handsets. If we have to wait for the whole world to get iPhones or Boost mobile devices, and then we have to get those devices to work together on proprietary networks, then we’re going to be waiting forever.

Thinking about these themes – Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity – I see a push back against the ideology of bigger, better, faster. Perhaps mobile networks that leverage these simple themes may be able to construct meaningful social networks across devices, with simple tools and techniques. There’s still a lot standing in the way of mobile networks, including cost and carrier interoperability, but perhaps this simpler approach may be beneficial.

There are a number of caveats attached to these themes. They are inherently emergent, meaning we’re not going to see the social networks market change to them overnight (or anytime soon). They also don’t reward the “biggest” networks, instead concentrating on smaller clusters. This is clearly in opposition to the goals of large players like Google, Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps these tools enable the long tail of social networks, which I think is an interesting possibility. We always though niche social networks would be the long tail of social networking. While niche networks will certainly represent a part of the tail, perhaps it is close networks, with inherent small-group personalization, that offer us a way forward.

Thoughts — 11 Comments
5
May 08

Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and thanks to Techcrunch, I’ve finally got my excuse. TC describes a scheme for making Twitter “portable”, with a goal of solving the service’s technical problems. According to the post, if you glue enough “standards” together, a Twitter-killing Phoenix just might rise from the ashes, and service outages will be a thing of the past.

Part I: Economies of Cooperation

As someone who spent almost seven years working in open source, I’m the last person who will argue against openness, but there are a few things wrong with TC’s notion. Most important, “open standards” have to work in cooperation with business, not in fierce competition. As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, free software is anything but free. Both the cathedral and the bazaar have extensive present and built-in costs.

So what does this have to do with Twitter? The idea of the “open Twitter killer” is built on an open service model. Open services are the Web 2.0 version of open source software. Just like open source software, open services have built-in and present costs: hardware, data centers, staff and developers. Because open services are standards-based, there is implied future-protection justifying the provisioning costs. Putting it more bluntly, open services can’t exist without business, especially at Twitter-scale.

When the founder of DataPortability.org publicly brainstorms ways to kill Twitter on Techcrunch, he’s taking the movement backwards. Anyone with engineering skill can dream up a way to “open” a service; the real challenge is bringing companies in to the fold to support open services. Talking about how to kill them is not a good way to do this.

Part II: Interaction and Next-Gen Social Networks

This brings us to our second point: does an open Twitter work? Even if some large companies stepped up to support the cost of an open Twitter, one that never suffered downtime, would we migrate to it? Barring a complete failure by Twitter, the answer is an obvious no. Why? While the DataPortability folks and TechCrunch think Twitter is just a messaging service, the other 99.9 percent of us see Twitter for what it is – a social network service.

I’ve always had a big-tent approach when it comes to social networks; a social network is something you feel, rather than something born from a set of features. Twitter only marginally stands up to the boyd/Ellison definition: Is Twitter bound? Does a 140-character bio really count as a profile? I believe that Twitter forces us to rethink some of the assumptions around social networks. Here’s how Twitter pushes thinking on the subject forward:

  • Message-centricity, as opposed to Profile-centricity: The core of any social network is messaging/communication, as illustrated by Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. In profile-centric social networks (Myspace, Facebook), messaging has largely taken place through the profile (I talk through my profile, you respond through my wall/apps/etc.). By locating the network around the profile, we were really locating it around “communication”. In Twitter, the “profile” is our communication, an always-on, interactive wall.
  • Imagined Identity: In focusing on interaction and communication, Twitter has eliminated many of the social network profile elements that make people uncomfortable. In Twitter, you’re not expected to list your favorite movies and upload lots of pictures (which, to many late 20′s and 30′s users feels like online dating). Rather, your identity is imagined – constructed through your communication and relation to your followers. For those who aren’t in social network expansion, the imagined identity (as exposed to the explicit identity of dating sites/Facebook) is much more comfortable.
  • Close Community: I’ve often described Twitter as a “close” community. While outlying bloggers have thousands of followers, most of us are followed by far less than 100 people (not including spambots). The knowledge of one’s disclosure community in a social network makes interaction more personal. A close community prevents some of the context leakages of monolith social networks; of course, Twitter needs a better approach to scale close community forward.
  • Constant Flux: The previous three elements – message centricity, imagined identity, and close community – interact to create a constant state of flux in Twitter. This is Twitter’s killer feature. For those who use Twitter in a close network, you constantly renegotiate your friends’ “profiles” throughout the day. As your concept of a “profile” is your friend’s last few posts, each new post is new information. This is why you keep checking Twitter throughout the day – people you care about are updating, communicating, and sharing.

Twitter isn’t a platform, it is a unique social network. It is a social network stripped to its most essential elements. Twitter provides social network designers a roadmap forward, a way of thinking about social networks more fundamentally. An “open” clone offers very little by way of competition. Further, an open clone that lacks the design or interaction aspects of Twitter would actually feel very different. Twitter is really about the user experience – something that simply can’t be replicated via an open standard.

Noticed / Software / Thoughts — No Comments
21
Apr 08

Freedom and Close Networks

On Friday, I released Freedom, software that fights the oppression of the internet. Incredibly, through the power of del.icio.us, Reddit, Twitter, blogs and endless Tumblr’s, Freedom has spread widely, with tens of thousands of views. Even more incredibly, I received a donation for my efforts, proving that Freedom is truly on the march. Here’s some of my favorite Freedom coverage:

And while most traffic to Freedom came in from the web or blogs, a substantial bit of Freedom’s traffic and buzz came from Twitter (which I was able to track via Tweetscan’s great, real-time analytics).

Techcrunch and I agree that smaller, more personal networks are the next wave. This has large implications for social (viral) content distribution. First a caveat: By volume, blogs are still king. However, compared to blogs, with their monolith long-post form, and invisible audience, these “closer” networks better fit social content. What do people want to do on the internet? They want to share links. Twitter and Tumblr are precisely tailored to link-based message passing (the fuel of viral traffic), aligning perfectly with our desires.

The real value of “close” networks, in my opinion, is knowledge of one’s audience. Being able to look at one’s Twitter followers and know who is reading you is incredibly powerful, if for no other reason than the milieu of sharing is pre-established. Ever notice how people on Twitter don’t adopt personas? Knowing one’s audience frees users to create as themselves, which is the ultimate sustainable model. The fact that viral content has moved into these close networks is very significant – and we’ll only see more of it going forward.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
15
Apr 08

Social Software’s Curation Era

For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Muxtape. For those who haven’t seen it, Muxtape is a website that allows you to create and share digital mixtapes. For those of us raised in the age of the mixtape, Muxtape is a wonderful find; it evokes warm memories of a youth spent hunched over a dubbing cassette deck, creating mixes for friends and (potential) loved ones. Muxtape is also surprisingly authentic – a “one name, one tape” policy is appropriately analog, and it also takes some time to create/upload (likely more a technical limitation than purposeful authenticity, but I like it).

Muxtape creator Justin Ouellette describes the project: “you can create a muxtape and upload up to twelve songs curated by you”. I’m particularly interested by the curation aspect, and not just because I’m in a LIS School. I see curation, and services built around curation as a tremendous emergent trend in social software.

Lets place things in a historical context. During Web 1.0, space was expensive, skills were limted, and digital media capabilities were nascent. The result was a curated web, but one with sub-par content that wasn’t personally engaging. Web 2.0 stood in sharp contrast to Web1; space was limitless, few skills were required, and rich media was everywhere. To our collective surprise, unlimited content proves an non-engaging as poor content. The curated web represents a reaction to this abundance: the re-introduction of curation (or editorship) is a very natural step towards making abundance engaging.

Look around at the software you love: your small, curated networks in Twitter stand in opposition to the monolith Facebook. Flickr, a product where norms enforce heavy curation, is a sense of pride for many. This trend continues in software like Tumblr, Seesmic, etc. – these exciting new networks create small, curated and close spaces for production/consumption. This stands sharply in opposition to the endless decontextualized mess of software-of-the-moment Friendfeed, as well as the market-centric ideologies of data portability. On a related note, Thomas Vander Wal elegantly addresses the context problem in a video he’s entitled “Granular Social Network.”

This is an exciting new direction for consumer web technologies. And while abundance works in some contexts (Google search), it doesn’t in most social contexts. How we dress, who we hang out with, etc. are all natural forms of curation – it only makes sense that our software should reflect this behavior. The market is not full of transparent-society ideologues like those who run venture capital firms.

Finally, I think there’s an important point to be made regarding form. Perhaps in reaction to the richness and complexity of Web 2.0, our production is increasingly embracing simplicity. The arms race on the web is no longer about technology, but about imagination. There are nearly countless forms into which small text, or mp3, or photos, can be assembled. To this extent, the fuel of the next web is bricolage, as opposed to the more inherently techno-capitalist notions of mashup and remix.

Oh yes, you can find my awesome muxtape here: http://chimprawk.muxtape.com.

Hacks / Software / Thoughts — 13 Comments
28
Mar 08

Fixing Information Overload in Twitter

As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I’m used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the complaining blogger. But I think that Twitter is about to drive me crazy with information overload, and I think I know how to solve the problem. So here’s a go.

Increasingly, Twitter has begin to feel like a collection of RSS feeds. My Twitter home screen is my personal newsreader. Unfortunately, it is completely dysfunctional. Some people I follow for personal reasons, some people I follow for work. Some people post often, some people once a week. I want to read every single message written by some people, and others can float by. Sort of like any other inbox, I guess.

If you’ve used Twitter, however, you know that all your messages go into the same place. Everyone is treated equal. There’s no method to deal with the information overload inherent in the system, there’s no way to mute over-Tweeters, there’s no way to have any control over the information space.

This may have worked in the early days of Twitter, where the interaction was supposed to be ephemeral – some messages you caught, some float by, who cares. Unfortunately, Twitter has grown up as it became more mainstream. People are saying “Did you see my Tweet” just as they would say “Did you get my email.”

We know how to deal with this: Folders, labels, mute buttons, regular expressions, etc. We need Tweetboxes, we need Tweetfolders to separate contexts, we need better strategies to deal with the information overload. And this is just in regards to incoming information – the multiple-audiences problem is another, more difficult problem.

Looking around at Twitter clients, I don’t see any that support such functionality. But I’m not really interested in using a Twitter client – I just want Twitter’s web interface to work. Let me create some folders, or tag my contact into a few different bins, so I could sort my incoming messages. A mute button would be nice as well, but right now folders (or labels, if you want to be Gmail-y) would really help. Look at the existing patterns that work with RSS and inboxes, and give us that. Because this current all-or-nothing isn’t the right answer.

Research / Thoughts — 1 Comment
25
Mar 08

The Best Social Software

Over the past few days, I’ve been discussing the problems of multiple contexts in social software. While I am primarily covering this problem in the context of Facebook, this is a problem that affects all social software. I’m actually feeling this problem most acutely with Twitter these days.

When we use social software, we adopt a persona. Broadly speaking, that persona is mediated by the audience and publicness of the space. For example, this blog is hyper-public (Googlable) and the audience is mostly research- and tech-folk. As a result, I write on topic and try to stay away from stuff that is going to embarrass me too much down the road. A simple equation, but I think it works.

At some level, we all engage in this audience/publicness calculation when we craft our persona in social software. Blogs charted this territory; the central tenet of “successful blogging” is knowing one’s audience. But blogs are usually hyper-public, meaning the nuance of publicness is lost. Let’s consider private Twittering as an alternative.

When one elects privacy measures in Twitter, they limit their publicness. That is, they exercise control over who sees the persona they are creating, a persona that is a function of audience. As private Twitterers construct these trusted places – they understand their audience/publicness calculation – the persona becomes more personal, the content more engaging. Remarked to me via a private Twitter message, “it feels like we have insight into ppls thoughts thru-out the day.”

The best social software should make you feel like you’re amongst friends, encouraging you to create a more true persona. The best social software lets you be you – whatever that you happens to be at the moment. Facebook 2005 hit that sweet spot, and Twitter affords the more geeky of us that place today. Perhaps this is why every time I log into Facebook all I see are Twitter status messages; vibrancy lies in the more personal network.

As contexts collide, however, the audience/publicness calculation has to be reworked. I don’t dare look at the hundreds of Twitter follower requests waiting for me (most spam – I’m not that internet famous yet), because I know allowing more people in to my circle would force me to refactor myself in Twitter. And I don’t want to do that yet, not while the experience is still so great. Ultimately, though, I’ll have to, and that will be the death of Twitter for me. The publicness will force depersonalization, and my Twitter will become like my blog.

Is this process unavoidable? I’m not sure. But the expectation of hyper-publicness ultimately written into social software needs to be rethought. As we force users to constantly renegotaite the audience/publicness calculation, I think we lose more than we gain. Rather than ultimately forcing publicness, we need to think of ways for users to create private spaces for sharing. This is why so many people love and care about LiveJournal to this day – it allowed the creation of private spaces.

Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It’s time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

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